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Driving, conservation and absorbing states in sandpiles

Alessandro Vespignani·Ronald Dickman·Miguel A. Munoz·Stefano Zapperi
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Abstract

We use a phenomenological field theory, reflecting the symmetries and conservation laws of sandpiles, to compare the driven dissipative sandpile, widely studied in the context of self-organized criticality, with the corresponding fixed-energy model. The latter displays an absorbing-state phase transition with upper critical dimension $d_c=4$. We show that the driven model exhibits a fundamentally different approach to the critical point, and compute a subset of critical exponents. We present numerical simulations in support of our theoretical predictions.

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Alessandro Vespignani, Ronald Dickman, Miguel A. Munoz, Stefano Zapperi. 1998-11-11. Driving, conservation and absorbing states in sandpiles. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.81.5676

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