“Glass-quake” in elastically loaded bulk metallic glasses

Amorphous solids exhibit scale-free avalanches even under small external loading thus can work as suitable systems to study critical behavior and universality classes. Abundance of scale-free avalanches in the entire elastic tension regime of bulk metallic glass (BMG) samples have been experimentally observed using acoustic emission (AE) measurements. In this work, we compare the statistics of avalanches with those of earthquakes, and find they both follow the Gutenberg-Richter law in statistics of energies and the Omori's law of aftershock rates, and share the same characteristics in the distribution of recurrence times. These resemblances encourage us to propose the term “Glass-quake” to describe avalanches in elastically loaded BMGs. Furthermore, our work echoes the potential universality of critical behavior in disordered physical systems from atomic to planetary scales，and motivates the use of elastic loaded BMGs as valuable laboratory simulators of seismic dynamics.