The role of collective elasticity on activated structural relaxation, yielding, and steady state flow in hard sphere fluids and colloidal suspensions under strong deformation.

We theoretically study the effect of external deformation on activated structural relaxation and aspects of the nonlinear mechanical response of glassy hard sphere fluids in the context of elastically collective nonlinear Langevin equation theory. This microscopic force-based approach describes activated relaxation as a coupled local-nonlocal event involving caging and longer range collective elasticity, with the latter becoming more important...