Glass breaks like metals, but at the nanometer scale

Abstract

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 vicinity of a crack tip in glass. Such a ductile fracture mechanism, widely observed in the case of metallic materials at the micrometer scale, might be also at the origin of the striking similarity of the morphologies of fracture surfaces of glass and metallic alloys at different length scales.

4 pages, 4 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev. Lett, few minor corrections, Fig. 1b changed

References in corpus (2)

• An extremal model for amorphous media plasticity
• Can crack front waves explain the roughness of cracks ?

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