Non-monotonic Dynamics in the Onset of Frictional Slip

The transition from static to dynamic friction is often described as a fracture instability. However, studies on slow sliding processes aimed at understanding frictional instabilities and earthquakes report slow friction transients that are usually explained by empirical rate-and-state formulations. We perform very slow ( $$ nm/s) macroscopic-scale sliding experiments and show that the onset of frictional slip is governed by continuous non-monotonic dynamics originating from a competition between contact aging and shear-induced rejuvenation. This allows to describe both our non-monotonic dynamics and the simpler rate-and-state transients with a single evolution equation.