Yielding in dense suspensions: cage, bond, and rotational confinements

The effect of weak particle anisotropy on the onset of fluidity in dense suspensions of glasses of repulsive, weakly attractive and strongly attractive spherical and dumbbell shaped particles is explored. Yield stresses are found to scale with volume fraction showing a divergence at random close packing for all systems. However the onsets of yielding in suspensions of spherical and dumbbell shaped particles are shown to display qualitatively different behaviors. Suspensions of hard spheres exhibit a single yield stress (strain) while suspensions of spheres experiencing short range attractions in dense gels display two yielding events. Double yielding occurs when attractions between particles are only a few kT and the suspensions are sufficiently dense. For dumbbell suspensions, single yielding is observed for hard dumbbell glasses in a region where the glasses are expected to be plastic while double yielding is observed when the particles are expected to have localized centers of mass and localized orientations. Double yielding is also observed for dense dumbbell suspensions that experience attractions while only single yielding events are observed in strongly attractive gels for both dumbbells and spheres. These results are discussed in the light of recent theories and simulations of mechanisms of localization in suspensions of spherical and weakly anisotropic particles.