Description

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In this book, the authors bring together basic ideas from fracture mechanics and statistical physics, classical theories, simulation and experimental results to make the statistical physics aspects of fracture more accessible.
They explain fracture-like phenomena, highlighting the role of disorder and heterogeneity from a statistical physical viewpoint. The role of defects is discussed in brittle and ductile fracture, ductile to brittle transition, fracture dynamics, failure processes with tension as well as compression: experiments, failure of electrical networks, self-organized critical models of earthquake and their extensions to capture the physics of earthquake dynamics. The text also includes a discussion of dynamical transitions in fracture propagation in theory and experiments, as well as an outline of analytical results in fiber bundle model dynamics
With its wide scope, in addition to the statistical physics community, the material here is equally accessible to engineers, earth scientists, mechanical engineers, and material scientists. It also serves as a textbook for graduate students and researchers in physics.

About the Author

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Soumyajyoti Biswas got his PhD in 2015 for works carried out at Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics. He has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai until March 2015. Presently he is a postdoctoral fellow at the Earthquake Research Institute, University of Tokyo. Purusattam Ray is professor in Physics at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSC), Chennai and an adjunct professor of Homi Bhabha National Institute (HBNI), Mumbai. He received his Ph.D. from Calcutta University in 1989. He was then SERC research fellow at the University of Manchester, England and subsequently Max Planck fellow at the MPI for Polymer Studies in Mainz and at the University of Mainz, Germany. He has made major contributions in the study of statistical physics of fracture. He annually organizes the International workshop on fracture and breakdown processes. Bikas K. Chakrabarti is a senior professor of theoretical condensed matter physics at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics (SINP), Kolkata, and a visiting professor of economics at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India. He received his doctorate in physics from Calcutta University in 1979 (for research at SINP). Following postdoctoral positions at Oxford University and Cologne University, he joined SINP in 1983. His main research interests include physics of fracture, quantum glasses, etc., and the interdisciplinary sciences of optimization, brain modeling, and econophysics. He has written several books and reviews on these topics.