Breakdown of elasticity in amorphous solids

What characterizes a solid is the way that it responds to external stresses. Ordered solids, such as crystals, exhibit an elastic regime followed by a plastic regime, both understood microscopically in terms of lattice distortion and dislocations. For amorphous solids the situation is instead less clear, and the microscopic understanding of the response to deformation and stress is a very active research topic. Several studies have revealed that even in the elastic regime the response is very jerky at low temperature, resembling very much the response of disordered magnetic materials(1-6). Here we show that in a very large class of amorphous solids this behaviour emerges upon decreasing temperature, as a phase transition, where standard elastic behaviour breaks down. At the transition all nonlinear elastic moduli diverge and standard elasticity theory no longer holds. Below the transition, the response to deformation becomes history- and time-dependent.