Section: New Results

Traveling pulses in the Burridge-Knopoff model

Participants : Guillaume James, Jose Eduardo Morales Morales, Arnaud Tonnelier.

The Burridge-Knopoff model describes the earthquake faulting process through the interaction of two plates modeled as a chain of blocks elastically coupled subject to a friction force. We study the existence of soliton-like solutions for the excitable Burridge-Knopoff model with different friction forces. We report for the first time the propagation of a one-pulse solitary wave where the position of the blocks remains unchanged after the passage of the wave. Extensive numerical simulations are done for different friction laws and a systematic investigation of the influence of the pulling velocity and the coupling constant is done. For a piecewise linear frictional law, we prove the existence of a traveling pulse in the weak coupling limit. A lower bound of the propagation speed is derived together with results on the shape of the traveling wave.