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Structural rearrangements are an essential property of atomic and molecular glasses; they are critical in controlling resistance to flow and are central to the evolution of many properties of glasses, such as their heat capacity and dielectric constant. Despite their importance, these rearrangements cannot directly be visualized in atomic glasses. We used a colloidal glass to obtain direct three-dimensional images of thermally induced structural rearrangements in the presence of an applied shear. We identified localized irreversible shear transformation zones and determined their formation energy and topology. A transformation favored successive ones in its vicinity. Using continuum models, we elucidated the interplay between applied strain and thermal fluctuations that governs the formation of these zones in both colloidal and molecular glasses.

Uniaxial compression tests were performed on micron-sized columns of amorphous PdSi to investigate the effect of sample size on deformation behavior. Cylindrical columns with diameters between 8μm and 140nm were fabricated from sputtered amorphous Pd77Si23 films on Si substrates by focused ion beam machining and compression tests were performed with a nanoindenter outfitted with a flat diamond punch. The columns exhibited elastic behavior until they yielded by either shear band formation on a plane at 50° to the loading axis or by homogenous deformation. Shear band formation occurred only in columns with diameters larger than 400nm. The change in deformation mechanism from shear band formation to homogeneous deformation with decreasing column size is attributed to a required critical strained volume for shear band formation.

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The dominant mechanism for creating large irreversible strain in atomic crystals is the motion of dislocations, a class of line defects in the crystalline lattice. Here we show that the motion of dislocations can also be observed in strained colloidal crystals, allowing detailed investigation of their topology and propagation. We describe a laser diffraction microscopy setup used to study the growth and structure of misfit dislocations in colloidal crystalline films. Complementary microscopic information at the single-particle level is obtained with a laser scanning confocal microscope. The combination of these two techniques enables us to study dislocations over a range of length scales, allowing us to determine important parameters of misfit dislocations such as critical film thickness, dislocation density, Burgers vector, and lattice resistance to dislocation motion. We identify the observed dislocations as Shockley partials that bound stacking faults of vanishing energy. Remarkably, we find that even on the scale of a few lattice vectors, the dislocation behavior is well described by the continuum approach commonly used to describe dislocations in atomic crystals.