Emergence of precursor instabilities in geo-processes: Insights from dense active matter

We present the hypothesis that investigation of precursor mechanisms to large scale instabilities, that have so far been overlooked in geo-processes, is possible. These precursor processes are evident in multicomponent materials, such as granular matter, when driven far from equilibrium on its microscale. The material is then classified as "dense active matter" with unexpected behaviour by non-local dissipation of internal energy releasing its dynamic incompatibility with the macroscopic gradients as self-excitation waves under external forcing. These instabilities are known in solid mechanics as flutter instabilities, nucleating at what is more widely known as an "exceptional point" in a variety of systems when two or more eigenvalues of the system coalesce. The common principle to connect processes at and across their characteristic scales is investigated using a minimalist formulation by coupling the scalar field variables of solid and fluid pressures in a compacting porous medium. We present a multiphysics generalisation of the phenomenon to the exciting findings of fluctuations with oscillatory exponential growth which nucleate at the exceptional point for inception of complex conjugate eigenmodes and propose a rigorous theory based on the extension of Onsager's theorem to non-local processes. Future work will need to compare model predictions to carefully designed laboratory experiments and expand the work to bridge the scale of the laboratory to the scale of field applications including design of new sensors tuned for detecting exceptional points preceding collapse of materials.