Abstract
We present a unified theory of fracture in disordered brittle media that reconciles apparently conflicting results reported in the literature. Our renormalization group based approach yields a phase diagram in which the percolation fixed point, expected for infinite disorder, is unstable for finite disorder and flows to a zero-disorder nucleation-type fixed point, thus showing that fracture has a mixed first order and continuous character. In a region of intermediate disorder and finite system sizes, we predict a crossover with mean-field avalanche scaling. We discuss intriguing connections to other phenomena where critical scaling is only observed in finite size systems and disappears in the thermodynamic limit.
- Received 6 October 2012
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.185505
© 2013 American Physical Society
Viewpoint
The Breaking of Brittle Materials
Published 29 April 2013
A model shows that as the size of a brittle material grows, the probability that it will fracture from a single crack approaches .
See more in Physics