Nanoscale oscillatory fracture propagation in metallic glasses

We describe the oscillatory crack propagation for small propagation velocities at the atomistic scale that was recently observed for brittle metallic glasses [G. Wang, Y.T. Wang, Y.H. Liu, M.X. Pan, D.Q. Zhao, W.H. Wang, Appl. Lett. 89 (2006) 121909; G. Wang, D.Q. Zhao, H.Y. Bai, M.X. Pan, A.L. Xia, B.S. Han, X.K. Xi, Y. Wu, W.H. Wang, Phys. Rev. Lett. 98 (2007) 235501]. Based on a simple model of crack propagation [Y. Braiman, T. Egami, Phys. Rev. E, 77 (2008) 065101(R)], we derived and analyzed expressions for the feature size, oscillation period, and maximum strain accumulated in the material.