Morphology and dynamics of a crack front propagating in a model disordered material

We present an experiment on the morphology and dynamics of a crack front propagating at the interface between an elastomer and a glass slide patterned with a prescribed distribution of defects. Regimes of high and low pinning strength are explored by changing the fracture energy contrast of the defects. We first analyze the roughness of crack fronts by measuring their typical amplitude in real and Fourier space. Irrespective of the pinning regime, no well defined self-affine behavior is found which may be explained by the emergence of an intermediate lengthscale between the defect size and the sample size. Then, we show that the dynamics at high fracture energy contrast results in rapid jumps alternating with periods of arrest. The distributions of speeds, displacements and waiting times are found to have an exponential decay which is directly related to the distribution of distances between defects along the direction of propagation.