Graduate assistantship positions are available in the Computational olid Mechanics Laboratory (http://lsms.epfl.ch/) at the Ecole olytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (http://www.epfl.ch/).
We are interested in highly motivated Ph.D. candidates with an academic background (B.S. and M.S.) in either Mechanical Engineering, Civil ngineering or Computational Materials Science.

Recent experiments in sliding friction are a major embarassment for all present understanding of friction using Coulomb or Rice-Ruina-Dieterich-Prakash rate-state dependent theories, which are the subject of large research programs. In particular, Rubinstein et al; (Detachment fronts and the onset of dynamic friction. Nature 430, 1005—1009. 2004) suggest that the contact area is not significantly altered by the fast fronts which perhaps are only precursors to the most important "slow fronts" travelling at speeds about 1/10 of the Rayleigh speed.