Yield in Amorphous Solids: The Ant in the Energy Landscape Labyrinth

It has recently been shown that yield in amorphous solids under oscillatory shear is a dynamical transition from asymptotically periodic to asymptotically chaotic diffusive dynamics However the type and universality class of this transition are still undecided Here we show that the diffusive behavior of the vector of coordinates of the particles comprising an amorphous solid when subject to oscillatory shear is analogous to that of a particle diffusing in a percolating lattice the so called ant in the labyrinth problem and that yield corresponds to a percolation transition in the lattice We explain this as a transition in the connectivity of the energy landscape which affects the phase space regions accessible to the coordinate vector for a given maximal strain amplitude This transition provides a natural explanation to the observed limit cycles periods larger than one and diverging time scales at yield