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Methods of Ex Situ and In Situ Investigations of Structural Transformations: The Case of Crystallization of Metallic Glasses
Published on: June 7, 2018
Statistics of thermal avalanches in driven amorphous systems
Zhiyu Cao1, Peter G Wolynes1,2,3
1Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, Rice University, Houston, Texas 77005, USA.
Abstract:
Within the framework of the random first-order transition theory of glasses, we discuss the statistics of "thermal avalanches," the large scale rearrangements in driven amorphous systems near their instability. Stringy excitations yield non-Poisson waiting-time statistics. Embedding these statistics in a generalized master equation captures the non-Markovian, aging dynamics of avalanche clusters. We apply this framework to analyze nonequilibrium signatures of thermal avalanches-auto-correlation functions and effective temperatures-under both quasi-static shear and stochastic shaking protocols. We use full counting statistics to derive the complete distribution of both the avalanche magnitudes and avalanche counts, uncovering the intermediate-time behavior.
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