Shear faults in a model brittle solid

This is work due to Craig Maloney at CMU and Mark Robbins at JHU. They studied fracture in an idealized 2d brittle material using Lennard-Jones potentials and bonds. Initial bonds were inferred from nearby atom pairs in a quenched system, then were allowed to break as the system was strained. When the solid is deformed, it can relax by breaking bonds, resulting in the damage patterns shown in these figures for a model undergoing shear with 200K particles. The two images plot the sine of the local rotation angle due to deformation in black/white and the autocorrelation of the local rotation in color, evidencing strong anisotropy. The right figure plays a movie of the induced damage.