Stabilizing stick-slip friction

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that applying small oscillations to shear force can synchronize stick-slip events and inhibit slow ruptures, revealing a potential mechanism for earthquake triggering and broader nonlinear system control.

Contribution

It introduces a method to synchronize and control stick-slip friction through small-amplitude oscillations, linking phase-locking to rupture mode transitions.

Findings

Stick-slip periods can be synchronized via oscillations.

Phase-locking inhibits slow rupture modes.

Transition to fast rupture may explain remote earthquake triggering.

Abstract

Even the most regular stick-slip frictional sliding is always stochastic, with irregularity in both the intervals between slip events and the sizes of the associated stress drops. Applying small-amplitude oscillations to the shear force, we show, experimentally and theoretically, that the stick-slip periods synchronize. We further show that this phase-locking is related to the inhibition of slow rupture modes which forces a transition to fast rupture, providing a possible mechanism for observed remote triggering of earthquakes. Such manipulation of collective modes may be generally relevant to extended nonlinear systems driven near to criticality.