Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics of Amorphous Materials II: Effective-Temperature Theory

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We develop a theory of the effective disorder temperature in glass-forming materials driven away from thermodynamic equilibrium by external forces. Our basic premise is that the slow configurational degrees of freedom of such materials are weakly coupled to the fast kinetic/vibrational degrees of freedom, and therefore that these two subsystems can be described by different temperatures during deformation. We use results from the preceding paper on the nonequilibrium thermodynamics of systems with internal degrees of freedom to derive an equation of motion for the effective temperature and to learn how this temperature couples to the dynamics of the system as a whole.