Strains, apparent ‘interfacial energies’ and non-affine displacements obtained from shear bands

Rösner, Harald; Wilde, Gerhard; Bera, Arabinda; Zaccone, Alessio

Zusammenfassung

In a recent study (Rösner et al., 2024), an analytical solution based on continuum mechanics was proposed to describe the asymmetric density variations observed within shear bands of metallic glasses formed at ambient temperature under various deformation conditions, such as tensile or compressive forces. In the present work, we demonstrate the applicability of this model by using the analytical expression to extract key physical parameters from shear bands in three different metallic glasses. In particular, the model allows for the determination of strain, interfacial energies, and microscopic displacement fields directly from experimentally measured density profiles. The strain values obtained are in agreement with independent strain measurements reported in diffraction experiments, while the predicted displacements correspond closely to atomic non-affine displacements derived from pair distribution function analysis. Furthermore, the analytical framework, via an effective energetic prefactor, provides an estimate for an apparent ’interfacial energy’ associated with the boundary between the undeformed glassy matrix and the shear band. These results demonstrate that the proposed multi-scale description captures essential features of shear band deformation and provides a physically meaningful framework for extracting microscopic deformation parameters from experiments.