Controlled mechanical failure in glasses via designed spatial inhomogeneity

In glasses under mechanical load, intrinsic spatial inhomogeneities at specific locations in the sample may cause shear banding. This allows us to initiate mechanical failure in a controlled manner. We perform molecular dynamics simulations to investigate inhomogeneous glass states under shear, using two different protocols to obtain these spatial inhomogeneities, viz., (i) by applying a temperature pulse, and (ii) by generating regions with a different degree of annealing via the swap Monte Carlo technique. In both cases, we find that shear banding is associated with a subtle interplay between stochasticity and local potential energy.