The elasto-plastic deformation of amorphous solids, glasses in particular, and their modes of failure, remain major challenges in mechanics and materials science, with far reaching fundamental and practical implications. At the fundamental level, the irreversible and failure dynamics of glasses pose deep questions about disordered, out-of-equilibrium, driven dissipative systems. Our understanding of failure pathways remains very incomplete and in particular, lags behind our understanding of the corresponding processes in the ordered counterparts of glasses, i.e. in crystalline solids. This research proposal aims to better understand the connection between amorphous microstructures and material resistance to failure. Main research objectives of this action are: (i) building a novel algorithm to detect the field of plastic instabilities in structural glasses, (ii) understanding the nonlinear micromechanics of glassy defects and extracting microscopic flow rules from glassy samples, and (iii) coupling particle based simulations and mesoscopic elasto-plastic models to study strain localization and fracture. Overall, this project has led to the development of new cutting edge microscopic tools that help us to characterize structural and mechanical heterogeneities in structural glasses. We have shown that one can firmly establish a link between microstructures and glassy defects. Furthermore, we have demonstrated that one can extract local flow rules from as-cast glassy samples. The latter opens new avenues including: (i) the systematic and efficient characterization of a large catalog of glasses with different chemical compositions and material preparation histories and (ii) the calibration of mesoscopic models of plasticity to study large scale dissipative collective phenomena, such as the nucleation of shear bands.
