  We report atomistic simulation results which indicate that the location of
shear banding in a metallic glass (MG) can be ascertained with reasonably high
accuracy solely from the undeformed static structure. Correlation is observed
between the location of the initiation of shear bands in a simulated MG and the
initial distribution of the density of fertile sites (DFS) for stress-driven
shear transformations identified a priori based on a deep learning model
devised in our recent work [Fan and Ma, Nat. Commun. 12, 1506 (2021)]. In
addition, we demonstrated that one can judge whether a glass is brittle or
ductile solely based upon its initial DFS distribution. These validate that
shear bands in MG arise from non-linear instabilities, and that the as-quenched
glass structure contains inhomogeneities that influence these instabilities.
This work also reveals an important subtlety regarding the non-deterministic
nature of athermal quasistatic shear simulations.
