Solitary waves in the excitable Burridge-Knopoff Model

International audienceThe Burridge-Knopoff model describes the dynamics of an elastic chain of blocks pulled over a surface. This model accounts for nonlinear friction phenomena and displays excitability when the velocity-dependent friction force is non-monotone. We introduce a simplified piecewise linear friction law (reminiscent of the McKean nonlinearity in spiking neuron models) which allows us to analyze the existence of large amplitude solitary waves. Propagation failure is shown to occur for weakly coupled oscillators