Amorphous solids have complex responses to deformations, with substantial consequences in material design and applications. In this respect, two intertwined aspects are important: stability and reversibility. It is crucial to understand, on the one hand, how a glass may become unstable due to increased plasticity under shear deformations, and, on the other hand, to what extent the response is reversible, meaning how much a system is able to recover the original configuration once the perturbation is released. In an article appeared on Science Advances (http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/12/eaat6387 ), Yuliang Jin, Pierfrancesco Urbani, Francesco Zamponi, and Hajime Yoshino focused on assemblies of hard spheres as the simplest model of a colloidal glasses and granular matter. They exhaustively mapped out the stability and reversibility of the glass under volume and shear strains using extensive numerical simulations. Their study provides a unified framework for understanding elasticity, plasticity, yielding, and jamming in amorphous solids.
See here [link: https://phys.org/news/2018-12-amorphous-solids-elastic-plastic.html]
and here [link: https://phys.org/news/2018-12-adventures-phase-space-plastic-elastic.html]
for more details.