Continuously Sheared Granular Matter Reproduces in Detail Seismicity Laws

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 ringlike geometry, our system delivers events of frictional failures with energies following a Gutenberg-Richter law. Moreover, foresho...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Physical review letters 2019-05, Vol.122 (21), p.218501-218501, Article 218501
Main Authors: Lherminier, S, Planet, R, Vehel, V Levy Dit, Simon, G, Vanel, L, Måløy, K J, Ramos, O
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Chemical Sciences
Disks
Earthquakes
Engineering Sciences
Physics
Seismicity
Shearing
Stress concentration
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Summary: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 ringlike geometry, our system delivers events of frictional failures with energies following a Gutenberg-Richter law. Moreover, foreshocks and aftershocks are described by Omori laws and interevent times also follow exactly the same distribution as real earthquakes, showing the existence of memory of past events. Other features of real earthquakes qualitatively reproduced in our system are both the existence of a quiescence preceding some main shocks, as well as magnitude correlations linked to large quakes. The key ingredient of the dynamics is the nature of the force network, governing the distribution of frictional thresholds.
ISSN:0031-9007
1079-7114
DOI:10.1103/physrevlett.122.218501