Molecular dynamics simulations of cavitation in a Zr 50 Cu 50 metallic glass exhibit a waiting time dependent cavitation rate. On short time scales nucleation rates and critical cavity sizes are commensurate with a classical theory of nucleation that accounts for both the plastic dissipation during cavitation and the cavity size dependence of the surface energy. All but one parameter, the Tolman length, can be extracted directly from independent calculations or estimated from physical principles. On longer time scales strain aging in the form of shear relaxations results in a systematic decrease of cavitation rate. The high cavitation rates that arise due to the suppression of the surface energy in small cavities provide a possible explanation for the quasibrittle fracture observed in metallic glasses. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.185502 PACS numbers: 63.50.Lm, 62.20.mm, 64.70.pe Amorphous materials, commonly termed glasses when quenched from the melt, occur in every class of material including ceramics, metals, and polymers. While the shear response of amorphous solids has received a significant amount of attention in the theoretical physics and molecular simulation literature over the past decade [1-8], significantly less attention has been devoted to hydrostatic loading in such systems [9,10]. This omission appears significant since experimental studies in metallic glass (MG) and other amorphous solids reveal nanocavities [11,12] that form during or subsequent to deformation and strongly implicate cavitation in the physics of the fracture process zone, even when the fracture behavior is relatively brittle [13][14][15]. The importance of cavitation in fracture is supported by recent molecular dynamics (MD) simulations in glassy Cu 50 Zr 50 and Fe 80 P 20 [16].Theory and simulation studies have been applied to understand this process in liquids more commonly than in glasses. Two recent studies [17,18] simulated the process of homogeneous nucleation in liquids in comparison with experimental data. These studies observed evidence of the curvature dependence of the surface energy on the measured cavitation rate, an effect that has itself been the subject of a significant amount of study [19][20][21][22]. One particularly notable contribution from simulation was the mapping out of the point at which the gas-liquid spinodal dips below the glass line and the glass must become unstable to cavitation [23].Continuum mechanics approaches to modeling the kinetics of cavitation have been developed over many years by numerous researchers [6,[24][25][26][27][28][29][30]. Often preexisting cavities are assumed to exist due to voids, inclusions, or intersections of grains, and the effect of surface energy is neglected. Various assumptions have been considered regarding the plastic constitutive behavior around the cavity [6,[24][25][26][27][28][29][30]. In these cases, because plastic and elastic energy both scale with the volume of the void, above a critical stress cavity growth becomes unbounded. Here, as in some earlier ...