title: Mechanical fluctuations suppress the threshold of soft-glassy solids: The secular drift scenario.
abstract: We propose a dynamical mechanism leading to the fluidization by external mechanical fluctuations of soft-glassy amorphous material driven below the yield stress. The model is based on the combination of memory effect and nonlinearity, leading to an accumulation of tiny effects over a long term. We test this scenario on a granular packing driven mechanically below the Coulomb threshold. We provide evidence for an effective viscous response directly related to small stress modulations in agreement with the theoretical prediction of a generic secular drift. We propose to extend this result more generally to a large class of glassy systems.
authors.affiliation: PMMH, ESPCI, UMR CNRS 7636; Université Paris 6; and Université Paris 7, 75005 Paris, France.
authors.forename: Adeline
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Pons
authors.affiliation: Université Rennes 1, Institut de Physique de Rennes, UMR UR1-CNRS 6251, Bâtiment 11A, Campus de Beaulieu, 35042 Rennes, France.
authors.forename: Axelle
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Amon
authors.affiliation: PMMH, ESPCI, UMR CNRS 7636; Université Paris 6; and Université Paris 7, 75005 Paris, France.
authors.forename: Thierry
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Darnige
authors.affiliation: Université Rennes 1, Institut de Physique de Rennes, UMR UR1-CNRS 6251, Bâtiment 11A, Campus de Beaulieu, 35042 Rennes, France.
authors.forename: Jérôme
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Crassous
authors.affiliation: PMMH, ESPCI, UMR CNRS 7636; Université Paris 6; and Université Paris 7, 75005 Paris, France.
authors.forename: Eric
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Clément