  The discovery that memory of particle configurations and plastic events can
be stored in amorphous solids subject to oscillatory shear has spurred research
into methods for storing and retrieving information from these materials.
However, it is unclear to what extent the ability to store memory is affected
by thermal fluctuations and other environmental noises, which are expected to
be relevant in realistic situations. Here, we show that while memory has a long
lifetime at low temperatures, thermal fluctuations eventually lead to a
catastrophic loss of memory, resulting in the erasure of most or all of the
stored information within a few forcing cycles. We observe that an escape from
the memory-retaining state (limit cycle) is triggered by a change in the
switching of plastic events, leading to a cascade of new plastic events that
were not present in the original limit cycle. The displacements from the new
plastic events change the particle configuration which leads to the loss of
memory. We further show that the rate of escaping from a limit cycle increases
in a non-Arrhenius manner as a function of temperature, and the probability of
staying in a limit cycle decays exponentially with an increase in the shearing
frequency. These results have important implications for memory storage since
increasing the temperature offers a means of effectively erasing existing
memories and allowing for the imprinting of new ones that can then be stored
for a long time at low temperatures.
