Yield stress, heterogeneities and activated processes in soft glassy materials

The rheological behavior of soft glassy materials basically results from the interplay between shearing forces and an intrinsic slow dynamics. This competition can be described by a microscopic theory, which can be viewed as a nonequilibrium schematic mode-coupling theory. This statistical mechanics approach to rheology results in a series of detailed theoretical predictions, some of which still awaiting for their experimental verification. We present new, preliminary, results about the description of yield stress, flow heterogeneities and activated processes within this theoretical framework.