Related papers: How Sandcastles Fall
Anyone who has built a sandcastle recognizes that the addition of liquid to granular materials increases their stability. However, measurements of this increased stability often conflict with theory and with each other [1-7]. A…
Experimental observation of a new mechanism of sandpile formation is reported. As a steady stream of dry sand is poured onto a horizontal surface, a pile forms which has a thin river of sand on one side flowing from the apex of the pile to…
We revisit the problem of the stress distribution in a frictional sandpile under gravity, equipped with a new numerical model of granular assemblies with both normal and tangential (frictional) inter-granular forces. Numerical simulations…
The well known Sandpile model of self-organized criticality generates avalanches of all length and time scales, without tuning any parameters. In the original models the external drive is randomly selected. Here we investigate a drive which…
We obtain an analytical solution of a one-dimensional sandpile problem in a thick flow regime, when it can be formulated in terms of linear equations. It is shown that a space periodicity takes place during the sandpile evolution even for a…
A directed dissipative sandpile model is studied in the two-dimension. Numerical results indicate that the long time steady states of this model are critical when grains are dropped only at the top or, everywhere. The critical behaviour is…
We study stochastic sandpile models with a height restriction in one and two dimensions. A site can topple if it has a height of two, as in Manna's model, but, in contrast to previously studied sandpiles, here the height (or number of…
We introduce a one-dimensional sandpile model which incorporates particle inertia. The inertial dynamics are governed by a new parameter which, as it passes through a threshold value, alters the toppling dynamics in such a way that the…
Consider the Abelian sandpile measure on $\mathbb{Z}^d$, $d \ge 2$, obtained as the $L \to \infty$ limit of the stationary distribution of the sandpile on $[-L,L]^d \cap \mathbb{Z}^d$. When adding a grain of sand at the origin, some region,…
Rotational constraint representing a local external bias generally has non-trivial effect on the critical behavior of lattice statistical models in equilibrium critical phenomena. In order to study the effect of rotational bias in a out of…
Sandpiles have become paradigmatic systems for granular flow studies in statistical physics. New directions of investigations are discussed here. Rather than varying the nature of the pile (sand, salt, rice,..) we have investigated changes…
When a colloidal suspension is dried, capillary pressure may overwhelm repulsive electrostatic forces, assembling aggregates that are out of thermal equilibrium. This poorly understood process confers cohesive strength to many geological…
The divisible sandpile starts with i.i.d. random variables ("masses") at the vertices of an infinite, vertex-transitive graph, and redistributes mass by a local toppling rule in an attempt to make all masses at most 1. The process…
The abelian sandpile model in two dimensions does not show the type of critical behavior familar from equilibrium systems. Rather, the properties of the stationary state follow from the condition that an avalanche started at a distance r…
We perform extensive numerical simulations of different versions of the sandpile model. We find that previous claims about universality classes are unfounded, since the method previously employed to analyze the data suffered a systematic…
We introduce a sandpile model where, at each unstable site, all grains are transferred randomly to downstream neighbors. The model is local and conservative, but not Abelian. This does not appear to change the universality class for the…
We find the collapse of columns of granular rods to show range of behaviors that depends on particle aspect ratio (length $L$ to diameter $d$) and initial pile geometry (height/radius). For all aspect ratios $L/d$ below 24 there exists a…
We show that deterministic systems with strong nonlinearities seem to be more appropriate to model sandpiles than stochastic systems or deterministic systems in which discontinuities are the only nonlinearity. In particular, we are able to…
Kinetic equations, which explicitly take into account the branching nature of sandpile avalanches, are derived. The dynamics of the sandpile model is described by the generating functions of a branching process. Having used the results…
A popular theory of self-organized criticality relates driven dissipative systems to systems with conservation. This theory predicts that the stationary density of the abelian sandpile model equals the threshold density of the fixed-energy…