Unravelling brittle fracture statistics out of self-healing patterns forming during femtosecond laser exposure

TL;DR

This paper reveals how self-healing patterns formed during femtosecond laser exposure encode fracture statistics of brittle materials, introducing a new method to analyze fracture behavior without extensive specimen testing.

Contribution

It demonstrates that laser-induced self-healing patterns contain fracture statistics information and proposes a novel, generic experimental approach to analyze brittle fracture without large sample ensembles.

Findings

Self-healing laser patterns encode Weibull fracture parameters.

Successive laser cycles are statistically independent.

Proposed method reduces need for multiple specimens.

Abstract

Femtosecond laser written patterns at the surface of brittle materials may show a regenerative random transition from self-organized to disordered structures. Here, we show that this random intermittent behaviour carries relevant fracture statistics information, such as the so-called Weibull parameters. Furthermore, we draw a phenomenological analogy with idle and busy periods arising in queueing systems that we used to establish that these successive laser generated cycles are statistically independent. Based on this analogy and together with microscopic observations, we propose an experimental method bypassing the need for many specimens to build-up statistically relevant ensembles of fracture tests. This method is potentially generic as it may apply to a broad number of brittle materials.