Correlated failure initiation in impact-fracturing silica glass and silica ceramics

Samples of silica glass and silica ceramics were subjected to impact damaging. The time series of pulses of fractoluminescence (FL) from the samples were detected with the time resolution of 10 ns. The FL intensity is proportional to the energy release in events of nanostructural defect formation. The statistical analysis of the energy distributions in the time series showed that the multiple nucleations of primary defects in both monolithic and heterogeneous silica occur in a correlated manner typical for self-organizing processes.