Active glasses are dense and disordered systems consisting of motile particles that display phenomenology observed in many biological systems. Here we investigate motility-driven annealing and fluidization in these systems and establish a correspondence between the yielding behaviour of glassy systems under active dynamics and their yielding under oscillatory shear. The yielded region of the phase diagram correlates with tissue fluidization, whereas the annealing region explains age-related maturation and stiffening. This suggests that some mechanical changes observed in ageing tissues can partially stem from processes analogous to enhanced ageing observed in active glasses. In addition to showing similar yielding diagrams, we strengthen the correspondence to oscillatory shear by demonstrating diverging time scales to steady states, the possibility of memory encoding and reading, and the importance of stress reversals in the annealing process in both cases. Finally, we study yielding in active solids and demonstrate that given the correct geometry, one can either suppress or promote brittle failure via shear band formation by tuning activity. Active glasses are dense, disordered structures made up of motile constituents. Simulations now show that motility-driven annealing in such systems leads to mechanical changes, including increased brittleness.

Amorphous solids are known to fail catastrophically and in some situations, nano-scaled cavities are believed to play a significant role in the failure. In a recent work, using numerical simulations, we have shown the correspondence between cavitation under uniform expansion of amorphous solids and the yielding under shear. In this study, we probe the stability of spatially-homogeneous states sampled from expansion trajectories to alternate modes of driving, viz. macroscopic cyclic shear or local random deformation via activity. We find that, under cyclic shear and activity, the cavitation instabilities can occur in expanded states at much higher densities than under pure uniform-expansion, and the shift in density is determined by the magnitude of the secondary deformation. We also show that barriers to cavitation on the energy landscape are much smaller for cyclic-shear and activity than seen under expansion. Further, we also analyse the spatial manifestation of cavitation and investigate whether large scale irreversible plasticity can set in due to the combination of expansion and the secondary deformation. Overall, our study reveals the interplay between expansion and other deformation modes leading to cavitation instabilities and the existence of abundant relaxation pathways for such processes.