are calculated at ; finite temperature would of course reduce the effective potential corrugation so that a slip process could occur earlier, but this is equally true for both the quasi-static and shear model.

We want to point out, however, that the specific nature of the stick-slip process shown in the shearing calculation is not directly reproduced by our proposed quasi static model (see figures \[fig:3\] and \[fig:shear\_30\]). While the period lengths of the stick-slip cycle are in good agreement for the $0^\circ$ direction, they differ for the $30^\circ$ sliding path. Furthermore, the positions of the slip instabilities in the shearing calculations are of course not reproduced in our model, which allocates the slip points to the maxima of the unrelaxed energy curve. Thus, our new approach is not describing the “true” physical dynamics of the slip system, but rather provides a tool to arrive at much better estimates for the dissipated energy than the established model by Zhong and Tománek [@zhong:90; @tomanek:91], at considerable reduced computational effort compared to shearing calculations.

For the data containing the relaxed and the unrelaxed energy curves as well as the positions of the minima and maxima we propose two distinctively different ways to 