Snapshots of softness fields and particle arrangements for the oligomer pillar simulation and the granular pillar experiment, two of the systems investigated in the paper.
Dropping a smartphone on its glass screen, which is made of atoms jammed together with no discernible order, could result in it shattering. Unlike metals and other crystalline material, glass and many other disordered solids cannot be deformed significantly before failing and, because of their lack of crystalline order, it is difficult to predict which atoms would change during failure. "In order to understand how a system chooses its rearrangement scenario," said Douglas Durian , professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania, "we must make connection with the underlying microscopic structure. For crystals, it's easy; rearrangements are at topological defects such as dislocations. For disordered solids, it's a very hard 40-year-old problem that we're now cracking: What and where are structural defects in something that's disordered?" To find a link between seemingly disparate disordered materials, an interdisciplinary collaboration between Penn researchers in the School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Engineering and Applied Science with expertise in various materials studied an unprecedented range of disordered solids with constituent particles ranging from individual atoms to river rocks. Understanding materials failure on a fundamental level could pave the way for designing more shatter-resistant glasses or predicting geological phenomena like landslides. In a paper published in Science , the Penn researchers revealed commonalities among these disordered systems, defining a counterpart to the "defects" implicated in crystalline materials failure.
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