  A crucially important material parameter for all amorphous solids is the
yield stress, which is the value of the stress for which the material yields to
plastic flow when it is strained quasi-statically at zero temperature. It is
difficult in laboratory experiments to determine what parameters of the
inter-particle potential effect the value of the yield stress. Here we use the
versatility of numerical simulations to study the dependence of the yield
stress on the parameters of the inter-particle potential. We find a very simple
dependence on the fundamental scales which characterize the repulsive and
attractive parts of the potential respectively, and offer a scaling theory that
collapses the data for widely different potentials and in different space
dimensions.
