Himangsu Bhaumik

Abstract Solids subjected to repeated cycles of stress or deformation can fail after several cycles, a phenomenon termed fatigue failure. Although intensely investigated for a wide range of materials owing to its obvious practical importance, a microscopic understanding of the initiation of fatigue failure continues to be actively pursued, in particular for soft and amorphous materials.

Abstract Material training is a method to endow materials with specific responses through external driving. We study the complexity of attainable responses, as expressed in the number of sites that are simultaneously controlled. With increased complexity, convergence to the desired response becomes very slow. The training error decays as a power law with an exponent that varies continuously and vanishes at a critical threshold, marking the limit of trainable responses.