Related papers: Micro-slips inside a granular shear band as nano-e…
Friction plays a fundamental role in many natural processes, including earthquakes, landslides, and volcanic eruptions. Earthquakes occur when highly compressed fault surfaces accumulate large enough shear stresses, causing the faults to…
Earthquakes are produced by the propagation of rapid slip along tectonic faults. The propagation dynamics is governed by a balance between elastic stored energy in the surrounding rock, and dissipated energy at the propagating tip of the…
In this paper, the process of shear deformation of the medium formed by the cubic grains is investigated experimentally. It is demonstrated that the deformation process is intermittent and accompanied by the radiation of acoustic…
Shear banding and stick-slip instabilities have been long observed in sheared granular materials. Yet, their microscopic underpinnings, interdependencies and variability under different loading conditions have not been fully explored. Here,…
The frictional instability associated with earthquake initiation and earthquake dynamics is believed to be mainly controlled by the dynamics of fragmented rocks within the fault gauge. Principal features of the emerging seismicity (e.g.…
A fundamental mystery in earthquake physics is ``how can an earthquake be triggered by distant seismic sources?'' Here, we use discrete element method simulations of a granular layer, during stick-slip, that is subject to transient…
Seismogenic plate boundaries are presumed to behave in a similar manner to a densely packed granular medium, where fault and blocks systems rapidly rearrange the distribution of forces within themselves, as particles do in slowly sheared…
Shear rupture and fault slip in crystalline rocks like granite produce large dilation, impacting the spatiotemporal evolution of fluid pressure in the crust during the seismic cycle. To explore how fluid pressure variations are coupled to…
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…
We perform molecular dynamics simulations of homogeneous athermal systems of poly-disperse soft discs under shear. For purely repulsive interactions between particles, and under a confining external pressure, a monotonous flow curve (strain…
Natural faults often contain a fluid-saturated, granular fault-gouge layer, whose failure and sliding processes play a central role in earthquake dynamics. Using a two-dimensional discrete element model coupled with fluid dynamics, we…
We propose a theory of shear flow in dense granular materials. A key ingredient of the theory is an effective temperature that determines how the material responds to external driving forces such as shear stresses and vibrations. We show…
Fault zones mature through the accumulation of earthquakes and the wearing of contact asperities at multiple scales. This study examines how wear-induced gouge production affects the evolution of fault seismicity, focusing on earthquake…
The traction evolution is a fundamental ingredient to model the dynamics of an earthquake rupture which ultimately controls, during the coseismic phase, the energy release, the stress redistribution and the consequent excitation of seismic…
We consider a sheared granular system experiencing intermittent dynamics of stick-slip type via discrete element simulations. The considered setup consists of a two-dimensional system of soft frictional particles sandwiched between solid…
During an earthquake, slip occurs in a localised shear zone that features a heavily granulated fault core that can be characterised as a shear band. We study the formation of this fault core in a granular rock such as sandstone by…
We present results from a physical experiment which demonstrates that a sheared granular medium behaves in a manner analogous to earthquake activity. The device consists of an annular plate rotating over a granular medium in a stick-slip…
The way granular materials response to an applied shear stress is of the utmost relevance to both human activities and natural environment. One of the their most intriguing and less understood behavior, is the stick-instability, whose most…
Seismic faults release the stress accumulated during tectonic movement through rapid ruptures or slow slip events. The slow slip events play a crucial role in the seismic cycle as they impact the occurrence of earthquakes. However, the…
In a granular material, a macroscopically homogeneous deformation does not correspond to a homogeneous displacement field when looking at the individual grains. The deviation of a grain displacement from the value dictated by the continuum…