Suzanne Fielding, Professor of physics, Durham University

Amorphous materials include soft solids such as colloids, foams, emulsions, granular materials, and gels, as well as harder materials such as molecular and metallic glasses. In contrast to crystalline solids, the internal arrangement of their constituent microstructures (emulsion droplets, sand grains, etc.) lacks order. Understanding the rheological properties of these materials thus poses a major challenge. Typically, they behave elastically at low loads but yield plastically at larger loads. This talk will summarise recent progress in understanding the yielding transition between an initially solid-like state and a finally fluidised one, as a function of time since the application of an imposed strain or load, with a particular focus on the phenomenon of strain localisation during this dynamical process of yielding.