Interfacial Energies for Incoherent Inclusions

We study a variational problem describing an incoherent interface between a rigid inclusion and a linearly elastic matrix. The elastic material is allowed to slip relative to the inclusion along the interface, and the resulting mismatch is penalized by an interfacial energy term that depends on the surface gradient of the relative displacement. The competition between the elastic and interfacial energies induces a threshold effect when the interfacial energy density is non-smooth: small inclusions are coherent (no mismatch); sufficiently large inclusions are incoherent. We also show that the relaxation of the energy functional can be written as the sum of the bulk elastic energy functional and the tangential quasiconvex envelope of the interfacial energy functional.