We introduce a shear experiment that quantitatively reproduces the main laws of seismicity. By continuously and slowly shearing a compressed monolayer of disks in a ring-like geometry, our system delivers events of frictional failures with energies following a Gutenberg-Richter law. Moreover foreshocks and aftershocks are described by Omori laws and inter-event times also follow exactly the same distribution as real earthquakes, showing the existence of memory of past events. Other features of real earthquakes qualitatively reproduced in our system are both the existence of a quiescence preceding mainshocks, as well as magnitude correlations linked to large quakes. The key ingredient of the dynamics is the nature of the force network, governing the distribution of frictional thresholds.For more than a century, fracture and stick-slip frictional sliding have tried to explain the behavior of earthquakes. Brittle fracture induced by shear [1] was the most accepted model until the sixties. However, a more precise analysis of the radiated waves [2], the low amount of stress released by an earthquake in relation to the available one, the high energies needed to shear over a fractured surface, and over all, the lack of healing required to generate a second earthquake at the same location and close in time to the first one, set stick-slip sliding mechanisms as a more plausible explanation of earthquakes [3]. Despite these facts, the subcritical fracture of heterogeneous materials shows naturally a jerky behavior that seems closer to earthquake statistics than frictional sliding, which commonly displays a quasi-periodic stick-slip dynamics. Indeed, several fracture experiments [4-8] and numerical models [9, 10] have reported statistics of events following powerlaw distributions of sizes that have been compared to the the Gutenberg-Richter law [11]. The existence of aftershocks that follow the Omori law [12] are also common in fracture experiments [5][6][7][8].Concerning stick-slip frictional sliding, different laboratory experiments have analyzed the sliding dynamics between two solid blocks. From a physical perspective, studies on acrylic blocks have focused on the complex evolution of the frictional strength during the slipping process, describing the behavior as a dynamic fracture problem [13, 14]. Recent friction experiments on rocks have reported results on supershear ruptures [15] and precursory activity prior to stick-slip instabilities [16]. Precursory activity to stick-slip instabilities has been also reported in experiments shearing a layer of granular material [17]. Other relevant results on similar experimental systems include remote triggering [18], and the controlled slowing down of the dynamics [19]. However, one common limitation of many of those laboratory experiments is the fact that they show a main dynamics consisting in a quasi-periodic stick-slip behavior with a narrow distribution of sizes, which * Present address:
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