Understanding the emergence, interaction, and motion of crystal defects is crucial for the prediction of possible failure or, on the contrary, strengthening of crystalline materials. Such defects can roughly be described as a local irregularity in the typical crystalline structure. A prominent example of crystal defects are partial dislocations and stacking faults, which typically appear in closed-packed crystalline structures, for example in Hexagonal-closed-packed (HCP) or Face-centered-cubic (FCC) crystals.
The main goal of the present action was to predict the emergence of those defects in a mathematically rigorous passage from microscopic/ atomistic models to macroscopic/ continuum models, thus providing a possible justification of phenomenological models used in continuum mechanics. Here our viewpoint was energetic and we employed tools from the Calculus of Variations and Geometric Measure Theory, in particular Gamma-convergence. The latter technique allows to derive effective limiting energies for atomistic energies when the interatomic distance vanishes. Such a procedure is often referred to as a variational coarse-graining.