Related papers: Earthquake behaviour and large-event predictabilit…
We monitor the stick-slip displacements of a very slowly driven moveable perforated top plate which interacts via shearing with a packing of identical glass beads confined in a tray. When driven at a constant stress rate, the distributions…
We introduce a shear experiment that quantitatively reproduces the main laws of seismicity. By continuously and slowly shearing a compressed monolayer of disks in a ring-like geometry, our system delivers events of frictional failures with…
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…
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…
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.…
We consider a system of granular particles, modeled by two dimensional frictional elastic disks, that is exposed to externally applied time-dependent shear stress in a planar Couette geometry. We concentrate on the external forcing that…
It was conjectured for a long time that the tectonic plates are in a self-organized state of criticality and that the Gutenberg-Richter law is a manifestation of that. It was recently shown that for a system near criticality, the inequality…
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…
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…
We report on experiments investigating the dynamics of a slider that is pulled by a spring across a granular medium consisting of a vertical layer of photo-elastic disks. The motion proceeds through a sequence of discrete events, analogous…
We report moment distribution results from a laboratory earthquake fault experiment consisting of sheared elastic plates separated by a narrow gap filled with a two dimensional granular medium. Local measurement of strain displacements of…
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…
The shearing instability of a dilute granular mixture composed of smooth inelastic hard spheres or disks is investigated. By using the Navier-Stokes hydrodynamic equations, it is shown that the scaled transversal velocity mode exhibits a…
We study experimentally the fluctuations of deformation along a shear fault naturally emerging within a compressed frictional granular medium. Using laser interferometry, we show that the deformation inside this granular gouge occurs as a…
We present a simple model of earthquakes on a pre-existing hierarchical fault network. The system self-organizes on long time scales in a stationary state with a power law Gutenberg-Richter distribution of earthquake sizes. The largest…
We propose a new approach for generating synthetic earthquake catalogues based on the physics of soft glasses. The continuum approach produces yield-stress materials based on Lattice-Boltzmann simulations. We show that, if the material is…
Earthquakes are complex phenomena characterized by some fundamental seismic laws. However, under the framework of brittle fracture in disordered material, these universal scaling behaviors, especially for critical exponents, are still far…
Prediction in complex systems at criticality is believed to be very difficult, if not impossible. Of particular interest is whether earthquakes, whose distribution follows a power law (Gutenberg-Richter) distribution, are in principle…
Sensitive and fast force measurements are performed on sheared granular layers undergoing stick-slip motion, along with simultaneous imaging. A full study has been done for spherical particles with a +-20% size distribution. Stick-slip…
The behavior of shear-oscillated amorphous materials is studied using a coarse-grained model. Samples are prepared at different degrees of annealing and then subject to athermal and quasistatic oscillatory deformations at various fixed…