Resolving Structural Avalanches in Amorphous Carbon with Arclength Continuation

Abstract

Plastic deformation in amorphous solids is carried by localized shear transformations that self-organize into avalanches. In amorphous carbon modeled with a machine-learned interatomic potential, we find that the energetics and organization of these avalanches can be resolved by systematically following the underlying energy landscape. With a pseudo-arclength numerical continuation framework, we decompose avalanches into constituent shear transformations and determine their strain-dependent energetics. Our analysis shows that, prior to onset, avalanches have a latent structure that consists of well-separated local minima. We further demonstrate that arclength continuation yields an event driven framework for following avalanche dynamics, eliminating time-step effects on statistical avalanche properties such as distributions of stress drops.