The emergence of torsion in the continuum limit of distributed edge-dislocations

Abstract

We present a rigorous homogenization theorem for distributed dislocations. We construct a sequence of locally-flat Riemannian manifolds with dislocation-type singularities. We show that this sequence converges, as the dislocations become denser, to a flat non-singular Weitzenb\"ock manifold, i.e. a flat manifold endowed with a metrically-consistent connection with zero curvature and non-zero torsion. In the process, we introduce a new notion of convergence of Weitzenb\"ock manifolds, which is relevant to this class of homogenization problems.