Colloidal polycrystalline monolayers under oscillatory shear

In this paper we probe the structural response to oscillatory shear deformations of polycrystalline monolayers of soft repulsive colloids with varying area fraction over a broad range of frequencies and amplitudes. The particles are confined at a fluid interface, sheared using a magnetic microdisk, and imaged through optical microscopy. The structural and mechanical response of soft materials is highly dependent on their microstructure. If crystals are well understood and deform through the creation and mobilization of specific defects, the situation is much more complex for disordered jammed materials, where identifying structural motifs defining plastically rearranging regions remains an elusive task. Our materials fall between these two classes and allow the identification of clear pathways for structural evolution. In particular, we demonstrate that large enough strains are able to fluidize the system, identifying critical strains that fulfill a local Lindemann criterion. Conversely, smaller strains lead to localized and erratic irreversible particle rearrangements due to the motion of structural defects. In this regime, oscillatory shear promotes defect annealing and leads to the growth of large crystalline domains. Numerical simulations help identify the population of rearranging particles with those exhibiting the largest deviatoric stresses and indicate that structural evolution proceeds towards the minimization of the stress stored in the system. The particles showing high deviatoric stresses are localized around grain boundaries and defects, providing a simple criterion to spot regions likely to rearrange plastically under oscillatory shear.