Things break when over stressed. This
truism is both a curse and a boon: a
drinking glass is only useful if unbroken but a diamond is desirable
only if
broken. The fracture of an object into multiple pieces is a growth
process
in which a small crack extends until it attains the size of the system.
The
study of cracks, or more properly "fracture mechanics", is a vast field
that
encompasses practical concerns such as the integrity of a nuclear
reactor
vessel to cutting-edge research questions about the role of atomic
interactions at a crack tip.
In our group we focus on the growth process of fast
moving, or "dynamic",
cracks. We would like to know how a dynamic crack selects a direction
and
speed. These are challenging questions because fracture is a many-body
problem and the physical processes that govern the direction and speed
of a
crack occur near its tip where the material response is intrinsically
nonlinear. We attack these questions with a tightly interdependent
combination of theory, computation, and experiment.
