title: Universal Quake Statistics: From Compressed Nanocrystals to Earthquakes.
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.
authors.affiliation: Retired, Los Angeles, CA.
authors.forename: Jonathan T
authors.initials: JT
authors.lastname: Uhl
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, 1110 West Green Street, Urbana, IL 61801.
authors.forename: Shivesh
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Pathak
authors.affiliation: German Research Centre for Geosciences, Telegrafenberg, 14473 Potsdam, Germany.|Department of Earth Sciences, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089.
authors.forename: Danijel
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Schorlemmer
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, 1110 West Green Street, Urbana, IL 61801.
authors.forename: Xin
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, 1110 West Green Street, Urbana, IL 61801.
authors.forename: Ryan
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Swindeman
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, 1110 West Green Street, Urbana, IL 61801.
authors.forename: Braden A W
authors.initials: BA
authors.lastname: Brinkman
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, 1110 West Green Street, Urbana, IL 61801.
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: LeBlanc
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, 1110 West Green Street, Urbana, IL 61801.
authors.forename: Georgios
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Tsekenis
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, 1110 West Green Street, Urbana, IL 61801.
authors.forename: Nir
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Friedman
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics and Center for Nonlinear and Complex Systems, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, 27708-0305 USA.
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Behringer
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, University of Amsterdam, 1090 GL Amsterdam, Netherlands.
authors.forename: Dmitry
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Denisov
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, University of Amsterdam, 1090 GL Amsterdam, Netherlands.
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Schall
authors.affiliation: Department of Mechanical Engineering, One Dent Drive, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837.
authors.forename: Xiaojun
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Gu
authors.affiliation: Department of Mechanical Engineering, One Dent Drive, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837.|Department of Chemical Engineering, One Dent Drive, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837.
authors.forename: Wendelin J
authors.initials: WJ
authors.lastname: Wright
authors.affiliation: Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, 3400 North Charles Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21218.
authors.forename: Todd
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Hufnagel
authors.affiliation: Department of Materials Science, Caltech, MC 309-81, Pasadena, CA 91125-8100.
authors.forename: Andrew
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Jennings
authors.affiliation: Department of Materials Science, Caltech, MC 309-81, Pasadena, CA 91125-8100.
authors.forename: Julia R
authors.initials: JR
authors.lastname: Greer
authors.affiliation: Department of Materials Science, The University of Tennessee Knoxville, TN 37996-2100.
authors.forename: P K
authors.initials: PK
authors.lastname: Liaw
authors.affiliation: Department of Earth Sciences, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089.
authors.forename: Thorsten
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Becker
authors.affiliation: German Research Centre for Geosciences, Telegrafenberg, 14473 Potsdam, Germany.
authors.forename: Georg
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Dresen
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, 1110 West Green Street, Urbana, IL 61801.
authors.forename: Karin A
authors.initials: KA
authors.lastname: Dahmen