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Elastoplastic lattice models for the response of solids to large-scale deformation typically incorporate structure only implicitly via a local yield strain that is assigned to each site. However, the local yield strain can change in response to a nearby or even distant plastic event in the system. This interplay is key to understanding phenomena such as avalanches in which one plastic event can trigger another, leading to a cascade of events, but is typically neglected in elastoplastic models. To include the interplay one could calculate the local yield strain for a given particulate system and follow its evolution, but this is expensive and requires knowledge of particle interactions that aren't necessarily pairwise additive or possible to extract from experiments. Instead, we use a structural quantity, “softness,” obtained using machine learning to correlate with imminent plastic rearrangements. We show that softness correlates with local yield strain and use it to construct a “structuro-elasto-plasticity” model that reproduces particle simulation results reasonably well for several observable quantities, confirming that we capture the influence of the interplay of local structure, plasticity, and elasticity on material response.

The plasticity of amorphous solids undergoing shear is characterized by quasi-localized rearrangements of particles. While many models of plasticity exist, the precise relationship between the plastic dynamics and the structure of a particle’s local environment remains an open question. Previously, machine learning was used to identify a structural predictor of rearrangements called “softness.” Although softness has been shown to predict which particles will rearrange with high accuracy, the method can be difficult to implement in experiments where data are limited and the combinations of descriptors it identifies are often difficult to interpret physically. Here, we address both of these weaknesses, presenting two major improvements to the standard softness method. First, we present a natural representation of each particle’s observed mobility, allowing for the use of statistical models that are both simpler and provide greater accuracy in limited datasets. Second, we employ persistent homology as a systematic means of identifying simple, topologically informed, structural quantities that are easy to interpret and measure experimentally. We test our methods on two-dimensional athermal packings of soft spheres under quasi-static shear. We find that the same structural information that predicts small variations in the response is also predictive of where plastic events will localize. We also find that an excellent accuracy is achieved in athermal sheared packings using simply a particle’s species and the number of nearest neighbor contacts.

Jammed soft disks exhibit avalanches of particle rearrangements under quasistatic shear. We introduce a framework for understanding the statistics of the progression of avalanches. We follow the avalanches (simulated using steepest descent energy minimization) to decompose them into individual localized rearrangements. We characterize the local structural environment of each particle by a machine-learned quantity, softness, designed to be highly correlated with rearrangements, and analyze the interplay between softness, rearrangements, and strain. Local yield strain has long been incorporated into elastoplastic models; here we show that softness provides a useful proxy for local yield strain. Our findings demonstrate that elastoplastic models must take into account the fully tensorial strain field in order to include the effects of changes in local yield strain due to rearrangements and introduce the equations underpinning a structuro-elastoplastic model that includes local softness.

The complexity of glasses makes it challenging to explain their dynamics. Machine learning (ML) has emerged as a promising pathway for understanding glassy dynamics by linking their structural features to rearrangement dynamics. Support vector machine (SVM) was one of the first methods used to detect such correlations. Specifically, a certain output of SVMs trained to predict dynamics from structure, the distance from the separating hyperplane, was interpreted as being linearly related to the activation energy for the rearrangement. By numerical analysis of toy models, we explore under which conditions it is possible to infer the energy barrier to rearrangements from the distance to the separating hyperplane. We observe that such successful inference is possible only under very restricted conditions. Typical tests, such as the apparent Arrhenius dependence of the probability of rearrangement on the inferred energy and the temperature, or high cross-validation accuracy do not guarantee success. Since even in such relatively simple toy models, prediction success of ML models does not necessarily translate into success of learning the underlying physics, we suggest that more careful investigations are needed when such claims are made. For this, we propose practical approaches for measuring the quality of the energy inference and for modifying the inferred model to improve the inference, which should be usable in the context of realistic datasets.