Recent works have elucidated statistical similarities between compression experiments of porous materials and earthquakes. [1, 2, 3]. These synthetic earthquakes are studied by analysing the acoustic emission during the compression of a porous SiO₂-based glass.   The energy of acoustic emission events as well as their time occurrence events show that the failure process exhibits avalanche scale-invariance and follow the most representative laws in statistical seismology: the Gutenberg-Richter law, the modified Omori’s law and the unified scaling law of waiting times. In spite of the difference between time, space and energy scales, these analogies have attracted the attention of physicists as well as mathematicians.

References

[1] J.Baró, A.Corral, X.Illa, A.Planes, E. K. H. Salbe, W. Schranz, D. E. Soto-Parra, and E. Vives, Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 088702 (2013)

[2] G.F.Nataf, P.O.Castillo-Villa, J.Baró, X.Illa, E. Vives, A. Planes, and E. K. H. Salje, Phys. Rev. E 90, 022405 (2014)

[3] V. Navas-Portella, Á. Corral, and E. Vives, arXiv:1607.08866 [cond-mat.mtrl-sci]