Fig. 1.

(A) Snapshot of a configuration visited under flow from simulations in two dimensions (see Methods for details). Small and large particles are represented in different colors. The width of the black segments connecting particles is proportional to the contact force. The arrows indicate the shear direction. (B) Example of the evolution of the stress with time. Instantaneous jumps upward correspond to the creation of new contacts. Stress relaxes smoothly, however, within periods where contacts do not change. Interestingly, this situation is opposite to the plasticity of amorphous elastic solids, where stress loads continuously before relaxing by sudden plastic events, as illustrated in (C) for compressed soft elastic particles under quasistatic shear.