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Brener EA, Aldam M, Barras F, et al. Unstable Slip Pulses and Earthquake Nucleation as a Nonequilibrium First-Order Phase Transition. Phys Rev Lett. 2018;121(23):234302doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.234302.
Brener, E. A., Aldam, M., Barras, F., Molinari, J. F., & Bouchbinder, E. (2018). Unstable Slip Pulses and Earthquake Nucleation as a Nonequilibrium First-Order Phase Transition. Physical review letters, 121(23), 234302. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.234302
Brener, Efim A, et al. "Unstable Slip Pulses and Earthquake Nucleation as a Nonequilibrium First-Order Phase Transition." Physical review letters vol. 121,23 (2018): 234302. doi: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.234302
Brener EA, Aldam M, Barras F, Molinari JF, Bouchbinder E. Unstable Slip Pulses and Earthquake Nucleation as a Nonequilibrium First-Order Phase Transition. Phys Rev Lett. 2018 Dec 07;121(23):234302. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.234302. PMID: 30576171.
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Phys Rev Lett. 2018 Dec 07;121(23):234302. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.234302.

Unstable Slip Pulses and Earthquake Nucleation as a Nonequilibrium First-Order Phase Transition.

Physical review letters

Efim A Brener, Michael Aldam, Fabian Barras, Jean-François Molinari, Eran Bouchbinder

Affiliations

  1. Peter Grünberg Institut, Forschungszentrum Jülich, D-52425 Jülich, Germany.
  2. Chemical and Biological Physics Department, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 7610001, Israel.
  3. Civil Engineering Institute, Materials Science and Engineering Institute, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Station 18, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland.

PMID: 30576171 DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.234302

Abstract

The onset of rapid slip along initially quiescent frictional interfaces, the process of "earthquake nucleation," and dissipative spatiotemporal slippage dynamics play important roles in a broad range of physical systems. Here we first show that interfaces described by generic friction laws feature stress-dependent steady-state slip pulse solutions, which are unstable in the quasi-1D approximation of thin elastic bodies. We propose that such unstable slip pulses of linear size L^{*} and characteristic amplitude are "critical nuclei" for rapid slip in a nonequilibrium analogy to equilibrium first-order phase transitions and quantitatively support this idea by dynamical calculations. We then perform 2D numerical calculations that indicate that the nucleation length L^{*} exists also in 2D and that the existence of a fracture mechanics Griffith-like length L_{G}

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