Emergent scales and spatial correlations at the yielding transition of glassy materials

Glassy materials yield under large external mechanical solicitations. Under oscillatory shear, yielding shows a well-known rheological fingerprint, common to samples with widely different microstructures. At the microscale, this corresponds to a transition between slow, solidlike dynamics and faster liquidlike dynamics, which can coexist at yielding in a finite range of strain amplitudes. Here we capture this phenomenology in a lattice model with two main parameters: glassiness and disorder, describing the average coupling between adjacent lattice sites, and their variance, respectively. In absence of disorder, our model yields a law of correspondent states equivalent to trajectories on a cusp catastrophe manifold, a well-known class of problems including equilibrium liquid-vapor phase transitions. Introducing a finite disorder in our model entails a qualitative change, to a continuous and rounded transition, whose extent is controlled by the magnitude of the disorder. We show that a spatial correlation length ξ emerges spontaneously from the coupling between disorder and bifurcating dynamics. With vanishing disorder, ξ diverges and yielding becomes discontinuous, suggesting that the abruptness of yielding can be rationalized in terms of a length scale of dynamic heterogeneities.