title: Universality in fragmentation
abstract: Fragmentation of a two-dimensional brittle solid by impact and "explosion," and a fluid by "explosion" are all shown to become critical. The critical points appear at a nonzero impact velocity, and at infinite explosion duration, respectively. Within the critical regimes, the fragment-size distributions satisfy a scaling form qualitatively similar to that of the cluster-size distribution of percolation, but they belong to another universality class. Energy balance arguments give a correlation length exponent that is exactly one-half of its percolation value. A single crack dominates fragmentation in the slow-fracture limit, as expected.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, University of Jyvaskyla, P.O. Box 35, FIN-40351 Jyvaskyla, Finland.
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Astrom
authors.initials: BL
authors.lastname: Holian
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Timonen