Related papers: Statistical Physics of Fracture, Friction and Eart…

We review the developments of the statistical physics of fracture and earthquake over the last four decades. We argue that major progress has been made in this field and that the key concepts should now become integral part of the (under-)…

Simple models for ruptures along a heterogeneous earthquake fault zone are studied, focussing on the interplay between the roles of disorder and dynamical effects. A class of models are found to operate naturally at a critical point whose…

In order to clarify how the statistical properties of earthquakes depend on the constitutive law characterizing the stick-slip dynamics, we make an extensive numerical simulation of the one-dimensional spring-block model with the rate- and…

Earthquakes rank among the most destructive manifestations of the Earth's dynamics. Can they be predicted? This is often the first question students ask. To answer that right away: no, at present it is not possible to anticipate the date,…

Friction is one of the fundamental issues in physics, mechanics and material science with lots of practical applications. However, the understanding of macroscopic friction phenomena from microscopic aspect is still on the way. In this…

This chapter introduces the fracture nucleation process, their (extreme) statistics in disordered solids, in fiber bundle models, and in the two fractal overlap models of earthquake.

Since long back, scientists have been putting enormous effort to understand earthquake dynamics -the goal is to develop a successful prediction scheme which can provide reliable alarm that an earthquake is imminent. Model studies sometimes…

This entry in the Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science, Springer present a summary of some of the concepts and calculational tools that have been developed in attempts to apply statistical physics approaches to seismology. We…

Slow earthquakes differ from regular earthquakes in their slower moment release and size distribution dominated by smaller events. However, the physical origin of these slow earthquake statistics remains controversial. In this work, we…

Earthquakes are rupture-like processes that propagate along tectonic faults and cause seismic waves. The propagation speed and final area of the rupture, which determine an earthquake's potential impact, are directly related to the nature…

The dynamic energy balance is essential for earthquake studies. The energy balance approach is one of the most famous developments in fracture mechanics. To interpret seismological data, crack models and sliding on a frictional surface…

Earthquakes occur because of abrupt slips on faults due to accumulated stress in the Earth's crust. Because most of these faults and their mechanisms are not readily apparent, deterministic earthquake prediction is difficult. For effective…

A widespread framework for understanding frictional rupture, such as earthquakes along geological faults, invokes an analogy to ordinary cracks. A distinct feature of ordinary cracks is that their near edge fields are characterized by a…

Our understanding of earthquakes is based on the theory of plate tectonics. Earthquake dynamics is the study of the interactions of plates (solid disjoint parts of the lithosphere) which produce seismic activity. Over the last about fifty…

A geometric approach to the friction phenomena is presented. It is based on the holographic view which has recently been popular in the theoretical physics community. We see the system in one-dimension-higher space. The heat-producing…

Disorder and long-range interactions are two of the key components that make material failure an interesting playfield for the application of statistical mechanics. The cornerstone in this respect has been lattice models of the fracture in…

A review of the statistical properties of earthquakes is provided, centered mainly in the work of the author (apologies for that). We explain the scaling law for the recurrence-time distributions, its universal character for stationary…

If we assume that earthquakes are chaotic, and influenced locally then chaos theory suggests that there should be a temporal association between earthquakes in a local region that should be revealed with statistical examination. To date no…

The distribution of inter-occurrence time between seismic events is a quantity of great interest in seismic risk assessment. We evaluate this distribution for different models of earthquakes occurrence and follow two distinct approaches:…

Statistical physics has proven to be a very fruitful framework to describe phenomena outside the realm of traditional physics. The last years have witnessed the attempt by physicists to study collective phenomena emerging from the…