Controlling Elastoplastic Deformation in Amorphous Solids: Leveraging Many-Body Particle Interactions for Energy Landscape and Dissipation Modulation

This research project aims to advance fundamental understanding of the deformation behavior of amorphous solids with many-body interactions among constituent particles. Unlike crystalline materials, amorphous solids such as metallic glasses and granular systems exhibit complex, non-crystalline structures and deformation mechanisms that are not captured by conventional models based on binary interactions. In many-body systems, the interaction between two particles can be influenced by the presence of a third — a phenomenon common in biological tissues and social networks but not yet well understood in the context of amorphous solids. This project seeks to extract governing physics from simulations and experiments of amorphous systems with many-body interactions and develop new solid mechanics models to predict their behavior. The outcomes seek to to impact a wide range of applications, including adaptive metamaterials, two-dimensional materials, and damage-tolerant structural materials. Educational activities include hands-on demonstrations, curriculum integration, and public outreach aimed at fostering future scientists and engineers. The technical objective is to quantify how many-body interactions influence deformation through the lens of energy landscape complexity. Atomistic simulations and machine learning–assisted analyses will be used to study emergent features in the energy landscape while systematically tuning many-body interactions. These findings look to be validated through two granular experimental systems with fluid-mediated interactions arising from air-fluidization and capillarity. Realistic interactions will be modeled using graph neural networks and integrated into atomistic simulations. A key focus is to uncover how many-body effects alter the synchrony between particle-level and system-level energy responses during deformation. The results will inform a meso-scale elastoplastic finite element model capable of capturing strain localization and shear band formation. Ultimately, the project aims to enable the design of advanced amorphous materials by engineering the morphology of their energy landscapes via tailored particle interactions. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.