Density scaling and quasiuniversality of flow-event statistics for athermal plastic flows

Athermal steady-state plastic flows were simulated for the Kob-Andersen binary Lennard-Jones system and its repulsive version in which the sign of the attractive terms is changed to a plus. Properties evaluated include the distributions of energy drops, stress drops, and strain intervals between the flow events. We show that simulations at a single density in conjunction with an equilibrium-liquid simulation at the same density allow one to predict the plastic flow-event statistics at other densities. This is done by applying the recently established “hidden scale invariance” of simple liquids to the glass phase. The resulting scaling of flow-event properties reveals quasiuniversality, i.e., that the probability distributions of energy drops, stress drops, and strain intervals in properly reduced units are virtually independent of the microscopic pair potentials.