“…Ordinarily, one would expect brittle fracture to occur by the opening of microscopic cracks along the fault plane, while conventional plastic yielding associated with deformation of crystals is known to be pervasive and involve workhardening which seem to be incompatible with the localization of the deformation in shear bands indicating some form of work-softening. This distinct mode of shear failure is observed in a variety of materials, including some amorphous solids such as polymers [1,2,3] and bulk metallic glasses [4,5,6,7], rocks under high confining pressure [8,9,10] and crystalline solids deformed rapidly in impact experiments [11,12].…”