Papers › How collective asperity detachments nucleate slip at frictional interfaces
How collective asperity detachments nucleate slip at frictional interfaces
Tom W. J. de Geus, Marko Popović, Wencheng Ji, Alberto Rosso, Matthieu Wyart
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Sliding at a quasi-statically loaded frictional interface can occur via macroscopic slip events, which nucleate locally before propagating as rupture fronts very similar to fracture. We introduce a novel microscopic model of a frictional interface that includes asperity-level disorder, elastic interaction between local slip events, and inertia. For a perfectly flat and homogeneously loaded interface, we find that slip is nucleated by avalanches of asperity detachments of extension larger than a critical radius A_c governed by a Griffith criterion. We find that after slip, the density of asperities at a local distance to yielding x_σ presents a pseudo-gap P(x_σ) ∼(x_σ)^θ, where θ is a non-universal exponent that depends on the statistics of the disorder. This result makes a link between friction and the plasticity of amorphous materials where a pseudo-gap is also present. For friction, we find that a consequence is that stick-slip is an extremely slowly decaying finite size effect, while the slip nucleation radius A_c diverges as a θ-dependent power law of the system size. We discuss how these predictions can be tested experimentally.
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