Related papers: Geometry-controlled Failure Mechanisms of Amorphou…
Amorphous solids are known to fail catastrophically and in some situations, nano-scaled cavities are believed to play a significant role in the failure. In a recent work, using numerical simulations, we have shown the correspondence between…
The understanding of dynamic failure in amorphous materials via the propagation of free boundaries like cracks and voids must go beyond elasticity theory, since plasticity intervenes in a crucial and poorly understood manner near the moving…
Using large-scale molecular dynamics simulations for a system of $10^6$ particles, the response of a dense amorphous solid to the continuous expansion of its volume is investigated. We find that the spatially uniform glassy state becomes…
Understanding failure in nanomaterials is critical for the design of reliable structural materials and small-scale devices that have components or microstructural elements at the nanometer length scale. No consensus exists on the effect of…
The presence of defects such as vacancies in solids has prominent effects on their mechanical properties. It not only modifies the stiffness and strength of materials, but also changes their morphologies. The latter effect is extremely…
Amorphous solids are known to fail catastrophically via fracture, wherein cavitation at nano-metric scales is known to play a significant role. Micro-alloying via inclusions is often used as a means to increase the fracture toughness of…
We have studied the low speed fracture regime for different glassy materials with variable but controlled length scales of heterogeneity in a carefully mastered surrounding atmosphere. By using optical and atomic force (AFM) microscopy…
Understanding the cavity formation and cavity growth mechanisms in solids has fundamental and applied importance for the correct determination of their exploitation capabilities and mechanical characteristics. In this work, we present the…
We report on the modeling of the formation of a cavity at the surface of crystals confined by a flat wall during growth in solution. Using a continuum thin film model, we discuss two phenomena that could be observed when decreasing the…
Growing crystals form a cavity when placed against a wall. The birth of the cavity is observed both by optical microscopy of sodium chlorate crystals (NaClO$_3$) growing in the vicinity of a glass surface, and in simulations with a thin…
The transition between necking-mediated tensile failure of glasses, at elevated temperatures and/or low strain-rates, and shear-banding-mediated tensile failure, at low temperatures and/or high strain-rates, is investigated using tensile…
Elucidating the interplay of stress and geometry is a fundamental scientific question arising in multiple fields. In this work, we investigate the geometric frustration of crystalline caps confined on the sphere in both elastic and plastic…
It is expected that atomic vacancies or nanometric cavities reduce the number of chemical bonds of nearby atoms and hence the strength of a voided solid. However, the hardness of a porous specimen does not always follow this simple picture…
We report in situ Atomic Force Microscopy experiments which reveal the presence of nanoscale damage cavities ahead of a stress-corrosion crack tip in glass. Their presence might explain the departure from linear elasticity observed in the…
Nanocrystalline metals, i.e. metals in which the grain size is in the nanometer range, have a range of technologically interesting properties including increased hardness and yield strength. We present atomic-scale simulations of the…
The problem of measuring nontrivial static correlations in deeply supercooled liquids made recently some progress thanks to the introduction of amorphous boundary conditions, in which a set of free particles is subject to the effect of a…
Shells, when confined, can deform in a broad assortment of shapes and patterns, often quite dissimilar to what is produced by their flat counterparts (plates). In this work we discuss the morphological landscape of shells deposited on a…
Cavitation, the formation of vapor bubbles in metastable liquids, is highly sensitive to nanoscale surface defects. Using molecular dynamics simulations and classical nucleation theory, we show that pure water confined within defect-free…
This Letter is motivated by some recent experiments on pan-cake shaped nano-samples of metallic glass that indicate a decline in the measured shear modulus upon decreasing the sample radius. Similar measurements on crystalline samples of…
Studies of random close packing of spheres have advanced our knowledge about the structure of systems such as liquids, glasses, emulsions, granular media, and amorphous solids. When these systems are confined their structural properties…