The goal of this research is to understand emission of particles and photons before, during, and following the propagation of crack in a solid. This technique, fracto- emission, is a novel and innovative technique to study the crack formation, failure mechanisms, and crack propagation. The fast time response of photon and particle emission allows probing of fracture events over extremely short time intervals (< 10 ns). Atomic level events (fracto-emission) during brittle fracture will be related with the concepts of energy dissipation (with spatial and temporal resolution). The dynamics of catastrophic crack growth in brittle and semi-brittle materials will be analyzed. Glass, ceramic, and metal-ceramic composites will be studied.
