Avalanche properties at the yielding transition: from externally deformed glasses to active systems

Abstract: We investigated the yielding phenomenon in the quasistatic limit using numerical simulations of soft particles. Two different deformation scenarios, simple shear (passive) and self-random force (active), and two interaction potentials were used. Our approach reveals that the exponents describing the avalanche distribution are universal within the margin of error, showing consistency between the passive and active systems. This indicates that any differences observed in the flow curves may have resulted from a dynamic effect on the avalanche propagation mechanism. The evolution time required to reach a steady state differs significantly between active and passive scenarios under similar conditions. However, we demonstrated that plastic avalanches under athermal quasistatic simulation dynamics display a similar scaling relationship between avalanche size and relaxation time, which cannot explain the different flow curves.