English

The hockey-stick conjecture for activated random walk

Probability 2026-03-25 v4 Statistical Mechanics

Abstract

We prove a conjecture of Levine and Silvestri that the driven-dissipative activated random walk model on an interval drives itself directly to and then sustains a critical density. This marks the first rigorous confirmation of a sandpile model behaving as in Bak, Tang, and Wiesenfeld's original vision of self-organized criticality.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2411.02541,
  title  = {The hockey-stick conjecture for activated random walk},
  author = {Christopher Hoffman and Tobias Johnson and Matthew Junge},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.02541},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

13 pages; minor changes in response to referees' comments