Slow crack propagation through a disordered medium: Critical transition and dissipation

TL;DR

This paper models slow crack propagation in disordered media, revealing a critical transition that leads to self-organized criticality and scale invariance, with implications for understanding fracture dynamics.

Contribution

It extends a classical fracture model to include dissipation, demonstrating the origin of scale invariance from a non-equilibrium critical transition.

Findings

Model accurately reproduces dynamical and morphological scaling.

Identifies a non-equilibrium critical transition as the source of scale invariance.

Shows dissipation leads to self-organized critical behavior.

Abstract

We show that the intermittent and self-similar fluctuations displayed by a slow crack during the propagation in a heterogeneous medium can be quantitatively described by an extension of a classical statistical model for fracture. The model yields the correct dynamical and morphological scaling, and allows to demonstrate that the scale invariance originates from the presence of a non-equilibrium, reversible, critical transition which in the presence of dissipation gives rise to self organized critical behaviour.