Microstructure in Shape-Memory Alloys: Rigidity, Flexibility and Some Numerical Simultations

In this talk I will discuss a striking dichotomy which occurs in the mathematical analysis of microstructures in shape-memory alloys: On the one hand, some models for these materials display a very rigid structure with only very specific microstructures, if one assumes that surface energies are penalised. On the other hand, without this penalisation, for the same models a plethora of very ``wild'' solutions exists. Motivated by this observation, we seek to further understand and analyse the underlying mechanisms. Constructing explicit solutions for a model problem, we show that adding only little regularity to the model does not suffice to exclude the wild solutions. We illustrate these constructions by presenting numerical simulations of them. The talk is based on joint work with J. M. Taylor, Ch. Zillinger and B. Zwicknagl.