Random Walks, Electric Networks and The Transience Class problem of Sandpiles

Abstract

The Abelian Sandpile Model is a discrete diffusion process defined on graphs (Dhar \cite{DD90}, Dhar et al. \cite{DD95}) which serves as the standard model of \textit{self-organized criticality}. The transience class of a sandpile is defined as the maximum number of particles that can be added without making the system recurrent (\cite{BT05}). We develop the theory of discrete diffusions in contrast to continuous harmonic functions on graphs and establish deep connections between standard results in the study of random walks on graphs and sandpiles on graphs. Using this connection and building other necessary machinery we improve the main result of Babai and Gorodezky (SODA 2007,\cite{LB07}) of the bound on the transience class of an $n \times n$ grid, from $O(n^{30})$ to $O(n^{7})$. Proving that the transience class is small validates the general notion that for most natural phenomenon, the time during which the system is transient is small. In addition, we use the machinery developed to prove a number of auxiliary results. We exhibit an equivalence between two other tessellations of plane, the honeycomb and triangular lattices. We give general upper bounds on the transience class as a function of the number of edges to the sink. Further, for planar sandpiles we derive an explicit algebraic expression which provably approximates the transience class of $G$ to within $O(|E(G)|)$. This expression is based on the spectrum of the Laplacian of the dual of the graph $G$. We also show a lower bound of $Ω(n^{3})$ on the transience class on the grid improving the obvious bound of $Ω(n^{2})$.