Driving, Conservation, and Absorbing States in Sandpiles

1998/06/30 by Alessandro Vespignani, Ronald Dickman, Miguel A. Muñoz +2 · 8 citations
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Geological formations and processes #Material Dynamics and Properties #Theoretical and Computational Physics #cond-mat.stat-mech

paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.81.5676

12 pages, 2 figures; revised version with substantial changes and improvements

arxiv created 1998/11/11 · openalex publication_date 1998/12/21 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04

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\phantom\rule0ex0ex=\phantom\rule0ex0ex4. 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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• Universality Class of Nonequilibrium Phase Transitions with Infinitely Many Absorbing States
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