Plastic avalanches in the so-called elastic regime of metallic glasses

We present evidence of plastic avalanches in the so-called elastic regime of a glassy three dimensional Cu50Zr50 system. By means of extensive molecular Dynamics simulations we investigate this mechanical response of this system, subjected to tensile deformation, under finite strain rates at room temperature. We observe that the plastic avalanches, depicted as stress drops in the stress signal, occur not only in the well described and analyzed plastic regime, but even at the very early stage of the protocol, the global linear response regime. Several parameters such as different strain rates and system sizes were tested and the distributions of avalanche sizes and durations for each case were statistically analyzed. It turns out that in all cases the distributions follow a power law scaling indicating the existence of scale free avalanches of plastic events even at the very early deformation stage.