Unifying Plasticity in Ordered and Disordered Matter using Topological and Geometrical Descriptors
Abstract
Identifying the regions responsible for plastic flow in amorphous solids remains an open problem, since structural disorder seems to prevent the direct application of concepts such as dislocations, topological defects that successfully describe irreversible deformations in crystalline systems. Here, we introduce fields of dislocation, disclination, and incompatibility densities, that in crystals reduce to the standard sources of plasticity and assess their predictive power in amorphous materials. We find that, in a simulated two-dimensional glass as well in two- and three-dimensional experimental granular systems, these fields exhibit strong spatial correlations with D2min, a standard descriptor used to locate plastic events in disordered solids under shear, indicating that these fields are indeed reliable quantities for predicting plastic events. In contrast to D2min, these fields provide deeper insight into how local rotational and translational motions become coupled well before the onset of plastic events. Moreover, by allowing the two contributions to be disentangled, they reveal that rotational defects become increasingly dominant in three dimensions. Our approach paves the way for describing plasticity in crystalline and amorphous solids in a unified manner.
Versions
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BibTeX
@misc{wang2026unifying,
title = {{Unifying Plasticity in Ordered and Disordered Matter using Topological and Geometrical Descriptors}},
author = {Xin Wang and Yang Xu and Jin Shang and Yi Xing and Jie Zhang and Yujie Wang and Walter Kob and Matteo Baggioli},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2605.20847},
eprint = {2605.20847},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.20847},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Unifying Plasticity in Ordered and Disordered Matter using Topological and Geometrical Descriptors
AU - Xin Wang
AU - Yang Xu
AU - Jin Shang
AU - Yi Xing
AU - Jie Zhang
AU - Yujie Wang
AU - Walter Kob
AU - Matteo Baggioli
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/20
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2605.20847
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.20847
AB - Identifying the regions responsible for plastic flow in amorphous solids remains an open problem, since structural disorder seems to prevent the direct application of concepts such as dislocations, topological defects that successfully describe irreversible deformations in crystalline systems. Here, we introduce fields of dislocation, disclination, and incompatibility densities, that in crystals reduce to the standard sources of plasticity and assess their predictive power in amorphous materials. We find that, in a simulated two-dimensional glass as well in two- and three-dimensional experimental granular systems, these fields exhibit strong spatial correlations with D^2_min, a standard descriptor used to locate plastic events in disordered solids under shear, indicating that these fields are indeed reliable quantities for predicting plastic events. In contrast to D^2_min, these fields provide deeper insight into how local rotational and translational motions become coupled well before the onset of plastic events. Moreover, by allowing the two contributions to be disentangled, they reveal that rotational defects become increasingly dominant in three dimensions. Our approach paves the way for describing plasticity in crystalline and amorphous solids in a unified manner.
ER -