Analysis of natural time domain entropy fluctuations of synthetic seismicity generated by a simple stick–slip system with asperities

• Synthetic seismicity is produced by using an experimental stick–slip system.
• Entropy fluctuation δSδS of synthetic seismicity is used to study its Markovianity.
• The synthetic seismicity is non-Markovian for higher threshold magnitudes.
• The synthetic seismicity is non-Markovian for lower lengths of the time window.

In the framework of the information theory, entropy measures the level of disorder of a system or its uncertainty. Varotsos et al. (2004) introduced the concept of entropy in natural time domain as a discriminating statistics. In this paper, we analyzed the fluctuations of entropy, δSδS, of synthetic seismicity produced by an experimental stick–slip system in order to investigate its Markovian behavior. Our system, whose asperities are given by sandpapers of different granularity degrees, mimics the dynamics of tectonic plates. We found that δSδS is able to characterize the synthetic seismic process as non-Markovian for higher threshold magnitudes and lower lengths of the time window sweeping through the dataset.