Itamar Procaccia - Weizmann Insitute
Wednesday, July 8, 2026
Zoom opens: 10:30AM EDT
Seminar begins: 10:45AM EDT
Amorphous Solids: More than Meets the Eye
Understanding the mechanical response of amorphous solids, like glasses and granular media, requires considerations that go beyond standard approaches to elasticity theory and solid mechanics. To start, contrary to perfect crystalline solids that can exhibit purely elastic responses to strain, amorphous solids suffer from plastic responses for any amount of strain, and these typically appear as quadrupolar “Eshelby inclusions” in the displacement field that results from the plastic response. When these quadrupolar charges form a density, their gradients are dipolar fields which result in screening and the introduction of length-scales that do not exist in classical elasticity. Using theory, experiments and simulations I will explore in this lecture the deep consequences of these topological charges in determining the response of amorphous solids to external strains, and explain the instabilities that arise, like shear banding, shedding new light on phenomena that were under scrutiny for some length of time.