Geometric rigidity for incompatible fields in the multi-well case and an application to strain-gradient plasticity

Abstract

We derive a quantitative rigidity estimate for a multiwell problem in nonlinear elasticity with dislocations. Precisely, we show that the L 1 ∗ -distance of a possibly incompatible strain field β from a single well is controlled in terms of the L 1 ∗ -distance from a finite set of wells, of curl β , and of div β . As a consequence, we derive a strain-gradient plasticity model as Γ -limit of a nonlinear finite dislocation model, containing a singular perturbation term accounting for the divergence of the strain field. This can also be seen as a generalization of the result of Alicandro et al. (2018) to the case of incompatible vector fields