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Unifying plasticity in ordered and disordered matter using topological and geometrical descriptors

Xin Wang1,*, Yang Xu1,2,*, Jin Shang1,3, Yi Xing1, Jie Zhang1,3,†, Yujie Wang1,4,5,‡, Walter Kob4,6,§, and Matteo Baggioli1,2,7,∥

  • *These authors contributed equally to this work.
  • †Contact author: jiezhang2012@sjtu.edu.cn
  • ‡Contact author: yujiewang@sjtu.edu.cn
  • §Contact author: walter.kob@umontpellier.fr
  • ∥Contact author: b.matteo@sjtu.edu.cn
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Phys. Rev. Research 8, 043008 – Published 5 October, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/vxfs-lmcp

Abstract

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, which in crystals reduce to the standard sources of plasticity, and assess their predictive power in amorphous materials. We find that, in a simulated two-dimensional glass as well as in two- and three-dimensional experimental granular systems, these fields exhibit strong spatial correlations with Dmin2, a standard descriptor used to locate plastic events in disordered solids under shear, indicating that these fields are indeed reliable quantities for predicting plastic events. In contrast to Dmin2, these fields provide deeper insight into how local rotational and translational motions become coupled well before the onset of plastic events. Moreover, by allowing the two contributions to be disentangled, they reveal that rotational defects become increasingly dominant in three dimensions. Our approach paves the way for describing plasticity in crystalline and amorphous solids in a unified manner.

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Phys. Rev. Research 8, 043008– Published 5 October, 2026
  • Received 9 May 2026
  • Accepted 19 September 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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