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When the shock load is applied, materials experience incredibly high temperature and pressure conditions on picosecond timescales, usually accompanied by remarkable physical or chemical phenomena. Understanding the underlying physics that governs the kinetics of shocked materials is of great importance for both physics and materials science. Here, combining experiment and large‐scale molecular dynamics simulation, the ultrafast nanoscale crystal nucleation process in shocked soda‐lime silicate glass is investigated. By adopting topological constraints theory, this study finds that the propensity of nucleation is governed by the connectivity of the atomic network. The densification of local networks, which appears once the crystal starts to grow, results in the underconstrained shell around the crystal and prevents further crystallization. These results shed light on the nanoscale crystallization mechanism of shocked materials from the viewpoint of topological constraint theory.

 

Based on their structure, non-crystalline phases can fail in a brittle or ductile fashion. However, the nature of the link between structure and propensity for ductility in disordered materials has remained elusive. Here, based on molecular dynamics simulations of colloidal gels and silica glasses, we investigate how the degree of structural disorder affects the fracture of disordered materials. As expected, we observe that structural disorder results in an increase in ductility. By applying the activation-relaxation technique (an open-ended saddle point search algorithm), we demonstrate that the propensity for ductility is controlled by the topography of the energy landscape. Interestingly, we observe a power-law relationship between the particle non-affine displacement upon fracture and the average local energy barrier. This reveals that the dynamics of the particles upon fracture is encoded in the static energy landscape, i.e. , before any load is applied. This relationship is shown to apply to several classes of non-crystalline materials (oxide and metallic glasses, amorphous solid, and colloidal gels), which suggests that it may be a generic feature of disordered materials. 

Although peridynamics is widely used to investigate mechanical responses in materials, the ability of peridynamics to capture the main features of realistic stress states remains unknown. Here, we present a procedure that combines analytic investigation and numerical simulation to capture the elastic field in the mixed boundary condition. By using the displacement potential function, the mixed boundary condition elasticity problem is reduced to a single partial differential equation which can be analytically solved through Fourier analysis. To validate the peridynamic model, we conduct a numerical uniaxial tensile test using peridynamics, which is further compared with the analytic solution through a convergence study. We find that, when the parameters are carefully calibrated, the numerical predicted stress distribution agrees very well with the one obtained from the theoretical calculation.