Scale-free and small-world properties of earthquake network in Chile

Abstract

The properties of earthquake networks have been studied so far mainly for the seismic data sets taken from California, Japan and Iran, and features common in these regions have been reported in the literature. Here, an earthquake network is constructed and analyzed for the Chilean data to examine if the scale-free and small-world properties of the earthquake networks constructed in the other geographical regions can also be found in seismicity in Chile. It is shown that the result is affirmative: in all the regions both the exponent "gamma" of the power-law connectivity distribution and the clustering coefficient C take the universal invariant values "gamma ~1" and "C~0.85", respectively, as the cell size becomes larger than a certain value, which is the scale of coarse graining needed for constructing earthquake network. An interpretation for this remarkable result is presented based on physical considerations.