“…We look at energy minimization and consider a variational description of crack nucleation in a body with second-gradient energy dependence. We do not refer to higher order theories in abstract sense (see [13] for a general setting, [9] for a physical explanations in terms of microstructural effects, [34] for a generalization of [13] to higher-order complex bodies), rather we consider a specific energy, in which we account for the gradient of surface variations and confinement effects due to the spatial variation of volumetric strain. Specifically, the energy we consider reads as F (y, V ; B) := B Ŵ ∇y(x), ∇[cof∇y(x)], ∇[det ∇y(x)] dx…”