Possibility of Prediction of Avalanches in Power Law Systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates a modified Burridge-Knopoff model to analyze acoustic emissions in earthquake-like systems, revealing universal behaviors, power law statistics, and potential precursors to large slip events.

Contribution

It introduces a dissipative term in the model to mimic acoustic emissions and uncovers universal statistical features and precursor signals for large slip events.

Findings

AE signals follow power law distributions for amplitudes, durations, and intervals.

A precursor effect in cumulative dissipated energy indicates impending large slips.

Large and small events exhibit different power law behaviors, with small events sensitive to pulling speed.

Abstract

We consider a modified Burridge-Knopoff model with a view to understand results of acoustic emission (AE) relevant to earthquakes by adding a dissipative term which mimics bursts of acoustic signals. Interestingly, we find a precursor effect in the cumulative energy dissipated which allows identification of a large slip event. Further, the AE activity for several large slip events follows a universal stretched exponential behavior with corrections in terms of time-to-failure. We find that many features of the statistics of AE signals such as their amplitudes, durations and the intervals between successive AE bursts obey power laws consistent with recent experimental results. Large magnitude events have different power law from that of the small ones, the latter being sensitive to the pulling speed.