Period Doubling Bifurcation of Stress Drop for Stick-slip and Its Physical Implication

It is revealed in frictional experiments on medium-scale samples that period doubling bifurcation of stress drop for stick-slip occurs due to macroscopic heterogeneity of the sliding surface under conditions for typical stick-slip.The observed data show that the period doubling bifurcation of stress drop results from the alternate occurrence of strain release along the whole fault and along part of fault.This implies that complicated nonlinear behavior corresponds to clear physical implication in some cases.