2008-01-28
10:30 at HIF E 19

Self-Affine Dynamics of Stick-Slip Friction

Jens Feder

Department of Physics, University of Oslo

I will discuss the historical background, and Coulomb's work on failure and on friction. I describe recent experiments on stick-slip friction, and show that they are accurately described by a self-affine joint distribution for magnitude and duration, and show that the measured exponents lead to the conclusion that this stick-slip process is a scale-free self-organized critical (SOC) process. We discuss normal earthquakes and show that they are not SOC. However, recently discovered slow earthquakes have scaling exponents that are in the universality class as our experiments, and therefore SOC. For more information (e.g. pdf of the abstract) see http://www.ifb.ethz.ch/comphys/events