Speaker
Antonio Turiel

Speaker
Ana Maria Tarquis / Rosa Maria Benito

Speaker
Henar Herrero

Speaker
Diego Pazó / Miguel Angel Rodriguez / Juan Manuel Lopez

Speaker
Clara Picallo

Description Understanding how materials deform and break is a subject of great technological importance. At the same time, it requires knowledge about the basic processes governing these phenomena and hence it is very interesting from a fundamental physics perspective. Fracture and plasticity display intermittent scale invariant behavior. The presence of universal power law distributions in both temporal and spatial properties seems to suggest that they could emerge from some type of critical phenomenon. If this is the case, simplified theoretical approaches based on fundamental concepts could capture some of the essential features of the physical system. Further concepts and tools borrowed from statistical mechanics can help to deal with disorder, long range interactions and scaling laws. In this spirit, some simplified models have been developed and studied during the last decades. In this talk I will review some properties of the Random Fuse Model, in which the vectorial mechanical response of materials is mimicked by an scalar electrical analogue. This extremely simple approach has become the cornerstone of this kind of models. Here I will discuss several results concerning topics that range from localization of damage and the roughness of the resulting fracture profiles to the acoustic emission from brittle fracture and the scaling of the strain avalanches in ductile media.