Locality and nonlocality in elastoplastic responses of amorphous solids

A number of current theories of plasticity in amorphous solids assume at their basis that plastic deformations are spatially localized. We present in this paper a series of numerical experiments to test the degree of locality of plastic deformation. These experiments increase in terms of the stringency of the removal of elastic contributions to the observed elastoplastic deformations. It is concluded that for all our simulational protocols the plastic deformations are not localized, and their scaling is subextensive. We offer a number of measures of the magnitude of the plastic deformation, all of which display subextensive scaling characterized by nontrivial exponents. We provide some evidence that the scaling exponents governing the subextensive scaling laws are nonuniversal, depending on the degree of disorder and on the parameters of the systems. Nevertheless, understanding what determines these exponents should shed considerable light on the physics of amorphous solids.