Mean-field avalanche size exponent for sandpiles on Galton–Watson trees

We show that in Abelian sandpiles on infinite Galton–Watson trees, the probability that the total avalanche has more than t topplings decays as $$t^{-1/2}$$t-1/2. We prove both quenched and annealed bounds, under suitable moment conditions. Our proofs are based on an analysis of the conductance martingale of Morris (Probab Theory Relat Fields 125:259–265, 2003), that was previously used by Lyons et al. (Electron J Probab 13(58):1702–1725, 2008) to study uniform spanning forests on $${\mathbb {Z}^d}$$Zd, $$d\ge 3$$d≥3, and other transient graphs.

Approach to criticality in sandpiles

A popular theory of self-organized criticality predicts that the stationary density of the Abelian sandpile model equals the threshold density of the corresponding fixed-energy sandpile. We recently announced that this "density conjecture" is false when the underlying graph is any of Z2, the complete graph K(n), the Cayley tree, the ladder graph, the bracelet graph, or the flower graph. In this paper, we substantiate this claim by rigorous proof and extensive simulations. We show that driven-dissipative sandpiles continue to evolve even after a constant fraction of the sand has been lost at the sink. Nevertheless, we do find (and prove) a relationship between the two models: the threshold density of the fixed-energy sandpile is the point at which the driven-dissipative sandpile begins to lose a macroscopic amount of sand to the sink.

Self-organized criticality and coevolution of network structure and dynamics

We investigate, by numerical simulations, how the avalanche dynamics of the Bak-Tang-Wiesenfeld sandpile model can induce emergence of scale-free networks and how this emerging structure affects dynamics of the system.