Ductile and brittle yielding in thermal and athermal amorphous materials

Abstract: We study theoretically the yielding of sheared amorphous materials as a function of increasing levels of initial sample annealing prior to shear, in three widely used constitutive models and three widely studied annealing protocols. In thermal systems we find a gradual progression, with increasing annealing, from smoothly "ductile" yielding, in which the sample remains homogeneous, to abruptly "brittle" yielding, in which it becomes strongly shear banded. This progression arises from an increase with annealing in the size of an overshoot in the underlying stress-strain curve for homogeneous shear, which causes a shear banding instability that becomes more severe with increasing annealing. "Ductile" and "brittle" yielding thereby emerge as two limiting cases of a continuum of yielding transitions, from gradual to catastrophic. In contrast, athermal systems with a stress overshoot always show brittle yielding at low shear rates, however small the overshoot.