Mechanical annealing and yielding transition in cyclically sheared binary glasses

The effect of cyclic shear deformation on structural relaxation and yielding in binary glasses was examined using molecular dynamics simulations. We studied a binary mixture slowly cooled from the liquid phase to about half the glass transition temperature and then periodically deformed at small strain amplitudes during thousands of cycles. We found that the potential energy decays logarithmically upon increasing number of cycles. The analysis of nonaffine displacements revealed that the process of mechanical annealing proceeds via intermittent plastic rearrangements whose spatial extent decreases upon reaching lower energy states. We also probed the yielding behavior for glasses with different degrees of annealing by adjusting strain amplitude near the critical value. Interestingly, in contrast to zero-temperature amorphous solids, the critical strain amplitude remains unchanged for glasses with initially different energy levels. The formation of a shear band at the yielding transition correlates well with the sharp increase of the number of atoms with large nonaffine displacements.