{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/how-collective-asperity-detachments-nucleate","title":"How collective asperity detachments nucleate slip at frictional interfaces","arxiv_id":"1904.07635","date":"2019-04-16","proceeding":null,"authors":["Tom W. J. de Geus","Marko Popović","Wencheng Ji","Alberto Rosso","Matthieu Wyart"],"abstract":"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 $x_\\sigma$ presents a pseudo-gap $P(x_\\sigma) \\sim (x_\\sigma)^\\theta$, where $\\theta$ 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 $\\theta$-dependent power law of the system size. We discuss how these predictions can be tested experimentally.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.07635v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.07635v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"how-collective-asperity-detachments-nucleate","repo_url":"https://github.com/tdegeus/ElastoPlasticQPot","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"how-collective-asperity-detachments-nucleate","repo_url":"https://github.com/tdegeus/GMatElastoPlasticQPot","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}