Unifying Plasticity in Ordered and Disordered Matter using Topological and Geometrical Descriptors (opens in new tab)

Identifying the regions responsible for plastic flow in amorphous solids remains an open problem, since structural disorder seems to prevent the direct application of concepts such as dislocations, topological defects that successfully describe irreversible deformations in crystalline systems. Here, we introduce fields of dislocation, disclination, and incompatibility densities, that reduce to the standard sources of plasticity in crystals and...