Stress Driven Morphological Instabilities in Rocks, Glass, and Ceramics

TL;DR

This paper investigates the stability and morphological instabilities of stressed crystalline systems and their interfaces with melts, analyzing classical Gibbs stability criteria versus observed instabilities in rocks, glass, and ceramics.

Contribution

It compares Gibbs stability analysis with observed morphological instabilities, providing insights into phase interface behaviors under stress in materials.

Findings

Equilibrium configurations are stable under Gibbs variations.

Phase interfaces can exhibit universal morphological instability.

Qualitative discussion of instability manifestations in stressed systems.

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to further investigate the classical Gibbs analysis of the heterogeneous system "stressed crystal - melt." It is demonstrated that each equilibrium configuration is stable with respect to a special class of variations introduced by Gibbs. This basic result is compared with the opposite result on the universal morphological instability of phase interface separating a stressed crystal with its melt. Some plausible manifestations of the instabilities implied by the Gibbs model are qualitatively discussed.