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Physical significance of the curvature varifold-based description of crack nucleation

The nucleation and/or growth of cracks in elastic-brittle solids has been recently described in [14] in terms of a special class of measures and with a variational technique requiring the minimization of a certain energy over classes of bodies. Here, the physical foundations of the theory and the basic ideas leading to it are described and commented further on. A view on certain possible developments and shifts toward different settings is also given. This article has expository character.