Depth-sensing indentation tests in studying plastic instabilities

This review surveys the phenomenon of plastic instabilities occurring in depth-sensing indentation measurements. Investigations presented focus on the characterization of Portevin-Le Chatelier type instabilities observed in different metal alloys during indentation. The effect of some important factors such as solute concentration, the formation of Guinier-Preston zones, and grain size and orientation are described and discussed. The phenomenon of plastic instabilities as serrated flow recently observed in bulk metallic glasses is also briefly reviewed

Quantization in geometric pluripotential theory

The space of K\"ahler metrics can, on the one hand, be approximated by subspaces of algebraic metrics, while, on the other hand, can be enlarged to finite-energy spaces arising in pluripotential theory. The latter spaces are realized as metric completions of Finsler structures on the space of K\"ahler metrics. The former spaces are the finite-dimensional spaces of Fubini--Study metrics of K\"ahler quantization. The goal of this article is to draw a connection between the two. We show that the Finsler structures on the space of K\"ahler potentials can be quantized. More precisely, given a K\"ahler manifold polarized by an ample line bundle we endow the space of Hermitian metrics on powers of that line bundle with Finsler structures and show that the resulting path length metric spaces recover the corresponding metric completions of the Finsler structures on the space of K\"ahler potentials. This has a number of applications, among them a new approach to the rooftop envelopes and Pythagorean formulas of K\"ahler geometry, a new Lidskii type inequality on the space of K\"ahler metrics, and approximation of finite energy potentials, as well as geodesic segments by the corresponding smooth algebraic objects

Regularity of weak minimizers of the K-energy and applications to properness and K-stability

Let $(X,\omega)$ be a compact K\"ahler manifold and $\mathcal H$ the space of K\"ahler metrics cohomologous to $\omega$. If a cscK metric exists in $\mathcal H$, we show that all finite energy minimizers of the extended K-energy are smooth cscK metrics, partially confirming a conjecture of Y.A. Rubinstein and the second author. As an immediate application, we obtain that existence of a cscK metric in $\mathcal H$ implies J-properness of the K-energy, thus confirming one direction of a conjecture of Tian. Exploiting this properness result we prove that an ample line bundle $(X,L)$ admitting a cscK metric in $c_1(L)$ is $K$-polystable.Comment: v1 Comments welcome v2 New introduction and references added v3 Final version. Preliminaries section added. Some notation changed. No other change