Understanding glasses by characterizing their defects

One striking feature of glassy solids is their protocol dependence: materials made from the same melt, but prepared with different protocols, will exhibit qualitatively different physics, e.g. in their response to shear strains and resulting plasticity. In this talk, I shall detail my efforts to characterize this history-dependent physics through a combination of theory and simulation: from a solvable theory based on visualizing the preparation history as an effective quenched disorder; to the proposal that history dependence manifests mostly in the features of defects, or soft spots, wherein plasticity can be cheaply initiated, and that can be detected and characterized in simulated glasses; and back again to analytic efforts to devise a model able to predict these features and their response to changes in the preparation protocol of the solid.