On the stability of objective structures

The main focus of this thesis is the discussion of stability of an objective (atomic) structure consisting of single atoms which interact via a potential. We define atomistic stability using a second derivative test. More precisely, atomistic stability is equivalent to a vanishing first derivative of the configurational energy (at the corresponding point) and the coerciveness of the second derivative of the configurational energy with respect to an appropriate semi-norm. Atomistic stability of a lattice is well understood, see, e. g., [40]. The aim of this thesis is to generalize the theory to objective structures. In particular, we first investigate discrete sub- groups of the Euclidean group, then define an appropriate seminorm and the atomistic stability for a given objective structure, and finally provide an efficient algorithm to check its atomistic stability. The algorithm particularly checks the validity of the Cauchy-Born rule for objective structures. To illustrate our results, we prove numerically the stability of a carbon nanotube by applying the algorithm.