“…The high surface area to volume ratio present at the nanoscale dictates that any continuum-based model of deformation should incorporate the separate contribution of surface mechanics (Sharma and Ganti, 2004). Recently, the continuum-based surface/interface model proposed by Gurtin, Murdoch and co-workers (Gurtin and Murdoch, 1975; Gurtin et al, 1998) has been incorporated in the analysis of several typical crack problems (see for example, Kim et al, 2010Kim et al, , 2011aAntipov and Schiavone, 2011;Wang, 2015;Wang andSchiavone, 2015, 2016). It was first proved by Walton (2012) and later corroborated by Kim et al (2013) that the contribution of surface elasticity (based on the Gurtin-Murdoch model) to LEFM would, at best, reduce the classical strong square root singularity to a weaker logarithmic singularity.…”