Crack propagation in a gold crystal with and without the presence of an interface

The Embedded Atom Method (EAM) is used to study crack propagation in Au crystals and at an AuNi interface.~ The interface is constructed with an appropriate number of dislocations introduced to compensate for the lattice mismatch between Au and Ni crystals.~ Once the the stability of the interface is established, a starter crack is introduced and its properties are determined and compared with those of pure Au and Ni crystals.~ The massively parallel molecular dynamics code (lammps) is used for these studies.