Atomic nonaffinity as a predictor of plasticity in amorphous solids

Structural heterogeneity of amorphous solids is intimately connected to their mechanical behavior. In this letter, based on a perturbation analysis of the potential energy landscape, we derive a new structural indicator, termed the atomic nonaffinity, which qualifies the contribution of an individual atom to the total nonaffine modulus. We find that the atomic nonaffinity can efficiently characterize the locations of shear transformation zones as well as their protocol-dependent response arising from their orientational nature. We show that the predictive power of this structural indicator outperforms a previously proposed normal modes-based approach, which neglects the orientational information of local structure. These results provide new insight towards understanding and characterizing the plastic response of amorphous solids.