Correlations of non-affine displacements in metallic glasses through the yield transition

Abstract We study correlations of non-affine displacements during simple shear deformation of Cu–Zr bulk metallic glasses in molecular dynamics calculations. In the elastic regime, our calculations show exponential correlation with a decay length that we interpret as the size of a shear transformation zone in the elastic regime. This correlation length becomes system-size dependent beyond the yield transition as our calculation develops a shear band, indicative of a diverging length scale. We discuss these observations in the context of a recent proposition of yield as a first-order phase transition.