Nucleation barriers at corners for cubic-to-tetragonal phase transformation

Abstract

We are interested in the energetic cost of a martensitic inclusion of volume $V$ in austenite for the cubic-to-tetragonal phase transformation. In contrast with the work of [Kn\"upfer, Kohn, Otto: Comm. Pure Appl. Math. 66 (2013), no. 6, 867--904], we consider domain with a corner and obtain a better scaling law for the minimal energy ($E_{min} \sim \min(V^{2/3},V^{7/9})$). Our predictions are in a good agreement with physical experiments where nucleation of martensite is usually observed near the corners of the specimen.