Citation

Uhl JT, Pathak S, Schorlemmer D, Liu X, Swindeman R, Brinkman BA, LeBlanc M, Tsekenis G, Friedman N, Behringer R, Denisov D, Schall P, Gu X, Wright WJ, Hufnagel T, Jennings A, Greer JR, Liaw PK, Becker T, Dresen G, Dahmen KA. Sci. Rep. 2015; 5: e16493.

Affiliation

Department of Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, 1110 West Green Street, Urbana, IL 61801.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015, Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1038/srep16493

PMID

26572103

Abstract

Slowly-compressed single crystals, bulk metallic glasses (BMGs), rocks, granular materials, and the earth all deform via intermittent slips or "quakes". We find that although these systems span 12 decades in length scale, they all show the same scaling behavior for their slip size distributions and other statistical properties. Remarkably, the size distributions follow the same power law multiplied with the same exponential cutoff. The cutoff grows with applied force for materials spanning length scales from nanometers to kilometers. The tuneability of the cutoff with stress reflects "tuned critical" behavior, rather than self-organized criticality (SOC), which would imply stress-independence. A simple mean field model for avalanches of slipping weak spots explains the agreement across scales. It predicts the observed slip-size distributions and the observed stress-dependent cutoff function. The results enable extrapolations from one scale to another, and from one force to another, across different materials and structures, from nanocrystals to earthquakes.

Language: en