Project 6
Sandpile models were introduced almost twenty years ago as a paradigmatic example
of self-organized criticality (SOC) [1], the tendency of slowly driven dissipative systems
to display a scale free avalanche response. Such ideas have had an enormous
impact in different fields, ranging from magnetic systems [2], superconductors [3]
and mechanics [4, 5], to geophysics and plasma physics, including in particular the
magnetosphere [6, 8].
4
The influence also extends beyond physics, to for example
biology [9], human (heart) physiology [10] and cognitive processes or neuroscience [11].
The reason for this success lies in the wide variety of non-equilibrium systems
displaying an avalanche response to an external driving. One of the primary aims of
SOC was, originally, to explain the wide occurrence of 1/f
α
noise in natural phenomena,
through a direct relation between avalanche scaling and spectral properties [1].
References
- [1] P. Bak, C. Tang, and K. Wiesenfeld, Self-organized criticality, Phys. Rev. A 38, 364 (1988). [PDF]
- [2] S. K. Grumbacher, K. M. McEwen, D. A. Halverson, D. T. Jacobs, and J. Lindner, Self‐organized criticality: An experiment with sandpiles, Am. J. Phys. 61, 329 (1993). [PDF]
- [3]