During the summer of a few years ago Eric Brillaux, a student of the Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon, visited Bristol for a summer project. Thinking of something moderately ambitious that could (in theory) be achieved in a few months, we started to explore how simple crystals respond to oscillatory shear.
The original motivation of the work was rather speculative: I was wondering if it could be possible to transform mechanically an ordered system (a crystal) into an amorphous system (a glass) whilst preserving some degree of local order. To this purpose, the ideal model to consider was an atomistic binary mixture whose supercooled liquid state presents local structural motifs that are identical to the repeated units of its crystalline state (as we have previously shown, see here) .
In particular, we considered an oscillatory shear protocol. This is interesting not only because it mirrors more closely actual experimental methods, but also because it allows the system to behave either reversibly or irreversibly: if the oscillations are small, the crystal survives; if the deformations are large, amorphisation takes place.
In our article just out on Soft Matter, we discuss how this dynamical transition between the reversible and irreversible regime takes place in actual three dimensional crystals and how it depends on the crystal composition. For example, single-component crystals can transform structurally, from face-centred cubic structures to more body-centred cubic structures before becoming disordered. Instead, crystals of two components either transform reversibly or become amorphous at a critical oscillation amplitude.
The dynamics is also rather interesting: for instance, the growth of amorphous regions follows a coarsening pattern that is reminiscent of spinodal decomposition in non-driven systems.
In the end, the amorphous states that we obtain are not as rich in local structural motifs as I hoped, but the dynamical transition in itself has appeared to be very intriguing!
More details in the original article
Eric Brillaux, Francesco Turci, Soft Matter, 2019, doi 10.1039/C8SM01950A
Francesco Turci 