Stabilizing Stick-Slip Friction
Rosario Capozza, Shmuel M. Rubinstein, Itay Barel, Michael Urbakh, and Jay Fineberg
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.
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.107.024301 PACS numbers: 46.55.+d,
46.50.+a, 81.40.Pq, 91.30.Px