  Recently, a new nonlocal granular rheology was successfully used to predict
steady granular flows, including grain-size-dependent shear features, in a wide
variety of flow configurations, including all variations of the split-bottom
cell. A related problem in granular flow is that of mechanically-induced creep,
in which shear deformation in one region of a granular medium fluidizes its
entirety, including regions far from the sheared zone, effectively erasing the
yield condition everywhere. This enables creep deformation when a force is
applied in the nominally quiescent region through an intruder such as a
cylindrical or spherical probe. We show that the nonlocal fluidity model is
capable of capturing this phenomenology. Specifically, we explore creep of a
circular intruder in a two-dimensional annular Couette cell and show that the
model captures all salient features observed in experiments, including both the
rate-independent nature of creep for sufficiently slow driving rates and the
faster-than-linear increase in the creep speed with the force applied to the
intruder.
