The interaction of shocks and defects in Lennard-Jones crystals

The authors examine, using computational molecular dynamics, shocks launched in two-dimensional crystals by a flying plate. The interaction of the shock with various lattice defects is observed, and is seen to create sites of rapidly growing, thermalized, hot fluid-like phases included within the crystal lattice. They hypothesize that these fluid-like regions are the sites of the initial chemical reactions leading to detonation in energetic materials, and that crystallographic defects therefore control the sensitivity of single-crystal high explosives to shock-initiation. The computations are carried out on the massively parallel CM-200 using a parellelized version of the MLG algorithm.