Speaker: Prof. Shmuel Rubinstein

Host: Dr. Itamar Kolvin

Title: Friction and Fracture at Soft Interfaces: What is Soft? what is Not? 

Abstract:

Frictional slip and brittle fracture are often treated as separate problems, yet both are governed by the propagation of localized rupture fronts along interfaces. Soft materials are a particularly useful system for studying this behavior: their compliance leads to large deformations and slow rupture fronts, so the relevant dynamics are directly resolved experimentally, while much of the underlying physics remains consistent with classical frameworks developed for hard materials. But soft interfaces are not just neat model systems. They are mechanically important in their own right, especially as they often interact with a much harder surrounding world. In this talk I will show several systems ranging from very soft gels to relatively hard plastics, and ask which features of friction and fracture are truly specific to softness, and which reflect broader principles of interfacial failure across materials and scales. The implications range from the toughness of biological tissues to earthquakes.