Convergence of critical points for a phase-field approximation of 1D cohesive fracture energies

Variational models for cohesive fracture are based on the idea that the fracture energy is released gradually as the crack opening grows. Recently, [21] proposed a variational approximation via \(\Gamma \)-convergence of a class of cohesive fracture energies by phase-field energies of Ambrosio-Tortorelli type, which may be also used as regularization for numerical simulations. In this paper we address the question of the asymptotic behaviour of critical points of the phase-field energies in the one-dimensional setting: we show that they converge to a selected class of critical points of the limit functional. Conversely, each critical point in this class can be approximated by a family of critical points of the phase-field functionals.