Stress Driven Morphological Instabilities in Rocks, Glass, and Ceramics

The purpose of the study is to further investigate the classical Gibbs analysis of the heterogeneous system "stressed crystal - melt." It is demonstrated that each equilibrium configuration is stable with respect to a special class of variations introduced by Gibbs. This basic result is compared with the opposite result on the universal morphological instability of phase interface separating a stressed crystal with its melt. Some plausible manifestations of the instabilities implied by the Gibbs model are qualitatively discussed.