“…Note that these minimization algorithms require that the interaction potential has a continuous second derivative, justifying our choice of a third-order polynomial. BEM with hard-wall repulsion and finite-ranged attraction (Müser, 2014(Müser, , 2016Müser et al, 2017;Wang and Müser, 2017;Bazrafshan et al, 2017;Rey et al, 2017;Bugnicourt et al, 2018;Monti et al, 2021) or soft (Lennard-Jones type) repulsion (Greenwood, 1997;Feng, 2000;Wu, 2010;Medina and Dini, 2014;Robbins, 2014, 2016;Persson and Scaraggi, 2014;Monti et al, 2019;Ghanbarzadeh et al, 2020;Wang et al, 2021) have been used in the past to study the adhesion of spheres and rough surfaces. During retraction, these models are similar to fiber-bundle models of quasi-brittle fracture (Batrouni et al, 2002;Schmittbuhl et al, 2003;Stormo et al, 2012;Gjerden et al, 2013Gjerden et al, , 2014 and threshold-force models (Pohrt and Popov, 2015;Hulikal et al, 2017;Li et al, 2019).…”