  We develop and extend a method presented in [S. Patinet, D. Vandembroucq, and
M. L. Falk, Phys. Rev. Lett., 117, 045501 (2016)] to compute the local yield
stresses at the atomic scale in model two-dimensional Lennard-Jones glasses
produced via differing quench protocols. This technique allows us to sample the
plastic rearrangements in a non-perturbative manner for different loading
directions on a well-controlled length scale. Plastic activity upon shearing
correlates strongly with the locations of low yield stresses in the quenched
states. This correlation is higher in more structurally relaxed systems. The
distribution of local yield stresses is also shown to strongly depend on the
quench protocol: the more relaxed the glass, the higher the local plastic
thresholds. Analysis of the magnitude of local plastic relaxations reveals that
stress drops follow exponential distributions, justifying the hypothesis of an
average characteristic amplitude often conjectured in mesoscopic or continuum
models. The amplitude of the local plastic rearrangements increases on average
with the yield stress, regardless of the system preparation. The local yield
stress varies with the shear orientation tested and strongly correlates with
the plastic rearrangement locations when the system is sheared correspondingly.
It is thus argued that plastic rearrangements are the consequence of shear
transformation zones encoded in the glass structure that possess weak slip
planes along different orientations. Finally, we justify the length scale
employed in this work and extract the yield threshold statistics as a function
of the size of the probing zones. This method makes it possible to derive
physically grounded models of plasticity for amorphous materials by directly
revealing the relevant details of the shear transformation zones that mediate
this process.
