Particle pinning suppresses spinodal criticality in the shear-banding instability.

Strained amorphous solids often fail mechanically by creating a shear band. It had been understood that the shear-banding instability is usefully described as crossing a spinodal point (with disorder) in an appropriate thermodynamic description. It remained contested, however, whether the spinodal is critical (with divergent correlation length) or not. Here we offer evidence for critical spinodal by using particle pinning. For a finite concentration of pinned particles the correlation length is bounded by the average distance between pinned particles, but without pinning it is bounded by the system size.