On the density of shear transformations in amorphous solids

We study the stability of amorphous solids, focussing on the distribution P(x) of the local stress increase x that would lead to an instability. We argue that this distribution behaves as P(x)∼ x ɞ , where the exponent θ is larger than zero if the elastic interaction between rearranging regions is non-monotonic, and increases with the interaction range. For a class of finite-dimensional models we show that stability implies a lower bound on θ, which is found to lie near saturation. For quadrupolar interactions these models yield ɞ ≈ {0.6} for d = 2 and ɞ ≈ 0.4 in d = 3 where d is the spatial dimension, accurately capturing previously unresolved observations in atomistic models, both in quasi-static flow and after a fast quench. In addition, we compute the Herschel-Buckley exponent in these models and show that it depends on a subtle choice of dynamical rules, whereas the exponent θ does not.