Criticality in elastoplastic models of amorphous solids with stress-dependent yielding rates

We analyze the behavior of different elastoplastic models approaching the yielding transition. We propose two kinds of rules for the local yielding events: yielding occurs above the local threshold either at a constant rate or with a rate that increases as the square root of the stress excess. We establish a family of static universal critical exponents which do not depend on this dynamic detail of the model rules: in particular, the exponents for the avalanche size distribution P(S) similar to S(-tau S)f(S/L-df) and the exponents describing the density of sites at the verge of yielding, which we find to be of the form P(x) similar or equal to P(0) + x(theta) with P(0) similar to L-a controlling the extremal statistics. On the other hand, we discuss dynamical exponents that are sensitive to the local yielding rule. We find that, apart form the dynamical exponent z controlling the duration of avalanches, also the flowcurve's (inverse) Herschel-Bulkley exponent beta ( similar to (sigma - sigma(c))(beta)) enters in this category, and is seen to differ in 1/2 between the two yielding rate cases. We give analytical support to this numerical observation by calculating the exponent variation in the Hebraud-Lequeux model and finding an identical shift. We further discuss an alternative mean-field approximation to yielding only based on the so-called Hurst exponent of the accumulated mechanical noise signal, which gives good predictions for the exponents extracted from simulations of fully spatial models.