Shahar Gvirtzman

Biographical Details

Shahar earned his B.S. in Physics from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 2016. He moved on to a M.S. degree in Physics under the Nano-Science excellence program, and then joined the lab of Prof. Jay Fineberg to study the mechanisms controlling the onset of frictional motion. His Ph.D. work focused on the formation of interfacial ruptures, which later led to the initiation of sliding. For this work, which has important implications to nucleation of earthquakes along tectonic faults, he was awarded the Goodman Prize from the Racah Institute of Physics in the Hebrew University. In 2016-2024, Shahar served as a teaching assistant, mentoring undergraduate students in their lab courses in physics. In 2025, Shahar was selected as a MIT-Kalanyiot Postdoctoral Fellow, and as a Zuckerman Postdoctoral Scholar.

Research Interests

Shahar Gvirtzman is an experimental physicist, whose research lies at the interface of soft matter physics and mechanical engineering. He is interested in the processes leading to material instability, and specifically in the transition from slow processes to rapid failure. He uses a variety of experimental techniques to record these processes and gain insight about the mechanisms controlling the failure dynamics. As failure processes often lack a comprehensive understanding of their underlining mechanisms, he also takes part in formulating a theoretical framework to support the experimental measurements.

In his Ph.D., Shahar studied the onset of frictional sliding and managed to conduct, for the first time, controlled nucleation experiments, where the formation of frictional ruptures that enable the initiation of sliding was studied in detail. In his postdoctoral studies at MIT, he intends to study cavitation and fracture phenomena in soft materials, and study how the material softness affects its failure behavior.

Shahar’s work has influence on fields outside of physics. While his Ph.D. work contributed to the understanding of earthquake nucleation along natural faults, the proposed work at MIT aims to understand fracture in biological tissues.        

Select Publications

Gvirtzman, S., & Fineberg, J. (2021). Nucleation fronts ignite the interface rupture that initiates frictional motion. Nature Physics, 17(9), 1037–1042. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-021-01299-9

Gvirtzman, S., & Fineberg, J. (2023). The Initiation of Frictional Motion—The Nucleation Dynamics of Frictional Ruptures. Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 128(2). https://doi.org/10.1029/2022JB025483

Gvirtzman, S., Kammer, D. S., Adda-Bedia, M., & Fineberg, J. (2025). How frictional ruptures and earthquakes nucleate and evolve. Nature, 637(8045), 369–374. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08287-y