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Earth's surface materials constitute the basis for life and natural resources. Most of these materials can be catergorized as soft matter, yet a general physical understanding of the ground beneath our feet is still lacking. Here we provide some perspectives. 

Nearly all frictional interfaces strengthen as the logarithm of time when sliding at ultra-low speeds. Observations of also logarithmic-in-time growth of interfacial contact area under such conditions have led to constitutive models that assume that this frictional strengthening results from purely time-dependent, and slip-insensitive, contact-area growth. The main laboratory support for such strengthening has traditionally been derived from increases in friction during “load-point hold” experiments, wherein a sliding interface is allowed to gradually self-relax down to subnanometric slip rates. In contrast, following step decreases in the shear loading rate, friction is widely reported to increase over a characteristic slip scale, independent of the magnitude of the slip-rate decrease—a signature of slip-dependent strengthening. To investigate this apparent contradiction, we subjected granite samples to a series of step decreases in shear rate of up to 3.5 orders of magnitude and load-point holds of up to 10,000 s, such that both protocols accessed the phenomenological regime traditionally inferred to demonstrate time-dependent frictional strengthening. When modeling the resultant data, which probe interfacial slip rates ranging from 3 . μ m · s − 1 . to less than 10 − 5 μ m · s − 1 , we found that constitutive models where low slip-rate friction evolution mimics log-time contact-area growth require parameters that differ by orders of magnitude across the different experiments. In contrast, an alternative constitutive model, in which friction evolves only with interfacial slip, fits most of the data well with nearly identical parameters. This leads to the surprising conclusion that frictional strengthening is dominantly slip-dependent, even at subnanometric slip rates. 

Abstract The empirical constitutive modeling framework of rate‐ and state‐dependent friction (RSF) is commonly used to describe the time‐dependent frictional response of fault gouge to perturbations from steady sliding. In a previous study (Ferdowsi & Rubin, 2020), we found that a granular‐physics‐based model of a fault shear zone, with time‐independent properties at the contact scale, reproduces the phenomenology of laboratory rock and gouge friction experiments in velocity‐step and slide‐hold (SH) protocols. A few slide‐hold‐slide (SHS) simulations further suggested that the granular model might outperform current empirical RSF laws in describing laboratory data. Here, we explore the behavior of the same Discrete Element Method (DEM) model in SH and SHS protocols over a wide range of sliding velocities, hold durations, and system stiffnesses, and provide additional support for this view. We find that, similar to laboratory data, the rate of stress decay during SH simulations is in general agreement with the “Slip law” version of the RSF equations, using parameter values determined independently from velocity step tests. During reslides following long hold times, the model, similar to lab data, produces a nearly constant rate of frictional healing with log hold time, with that rate being in the range of ∼0.5 to 1 times the RSF “state evolution” parameterb. We also find that, as in laboratory experiments, the granular layer undergoes log‐time compaction during holds. This is consistent with the traditional understanding of state evolution under the Aging law, even though the associated stress decay is similar to that predicted by the Slip and not the Aging law.