Nonlinear network dynamics on earthquake fault systems - art. no. 148501

Earthquake faults occur in interacting networks having emergent space-time modes of behavior not displayed by isolated faults. Using simulations of th e major faults in southern California, we find that the physics depends on the elastic interactions among the faults defined by network topology, as w ell as on the nonlinear physics of stress dissipation arising from friction on the faults. Our results have broad applications to other leaky threshol d systems such as integrate-and-fire neural networks.