Non-Gaussian nature of the probability distribution of particles' displacements in the supercooled temperature regime in glass-forming liquids are believed to be one of the major hallmarks of glass transition. It has already been established that this probability distribution, which is also known as the van Hove function, shows universal exponential tail. The origin of such an exponential tail in the distribution function is attributed to the hopping motion of particles observed in the supercooled regime. The non-Gaussian nature can also be explained if one assumes that the system has heterogeneous dynamics in space and time. Thus exponential tail is the manifestation of dynamic heterogeneity. In this work we directly show that non-Gaussianity of the distribution of particles' displacements occur over the dynamic heterogeneity length scale and the dynamical behavior course grained over this length scale becomes homogeneous. We study the non-Gaussianity of the van Hove function by systematically coarse graining at different length scales and extract the length scale of dynamic heterogeneity at which the shape of the van Hove function crosses over from non-Gaussian to Gaussian. The obtained dynamic heterogeneity scale is found to be in very good agreement with the scale obtained from other conventional methods.

Breakdown of Stokes-Einstein relation in supercooled liquids is believed to be one of the hallmarks of glass transition. The phenomena is studied in depth over many years to understand the microscopic mechanism without much success. Recently it was found that violation of StokesEinstein relation in supercooled liquids can be tuned very systematically by pinning randomly a set of particles in their equilibrium positions. This observation suggested a possible framework where breakdown of Stokes-Einstein relation in the dynamics of supercooled liquids can be studied with precise control. We have done extensive molecular dynamics simulations to understand this phenomena by analyzing the structure of appropriately defined set of dynamically slow and fast particles clusters. We have shown that the Stokes-Einstein breakdown actually become predominant once the cluster formed by the slow particles percolate the entire system size. Finally we proposed a possible close connection between fractal dimensions of these clusters and the exponents associated with the fractional Stokes-Einstein relation.

Using numerical simulations, we have studied the yielding response, in the athermal quasi static limit, of a model amorphous material having inclusions in the form of randomly pinned particles. We show that, with increasing pinning concentration, the plastic activity becomes more spatially localized, resulting in smaller stress drops, and corresponding increase in the magnitude of strain where yielding occurs. We demonstrate that, unlike the spatially heterogeneous and avalanche led yielding in the case of the unpinned glass, for the case of large pinning concentration, yielding takes place via a spatially homogeneous proliferation of localized events. arXiv:1808.09723v2 [cond-mat.soft]

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Strained amorphous solids often fail mechanically by creating a shear-band. It had been understood that the shear banding instability is usefully described as crossing a spinodal point (with disorder) in an appropriate thermodynamic description. It remained contested however whether the spinodal is critical (with divergent correlation length) or not. Here we offer evidence for critical spinodal by using particle pinning. For a finite concentration of pinned particles the correlation length is bounded by the average distance between pinned particles, but without pinning it is bounded by the system size.