Annealing and rejuvenation in a two-dimensional model amorphous solid under oscillatory shear.

We study the annealing and rejuvenation behavior of a two-dimensional amorphous solid model under oscillatory shear. We show that, depending on the cooling protocol used to create the initial configuration, the mean potential energy can either decrease or increase under subyield oscillatory shear. For post-yield oscillatory shear, the mean potential energy increases and is independent on the initial conditions. We explain this behavior by modeling the dynamics using a simple model of forced dynamics on a random energy landscape and show that the model reproduces the qualitative behavior of the mean potential energy and mean-square displacement observed in the particle based simulations. This suggests that some important aspects of the dynamics of amorphous solids can be understood by studying the properties of random energy landscapes and without explicitly taking into account the complex real-space interactions which are involved in plastic deformation.