Title
Kadanoff Sand Piles, following the snowball
Abstract
This paper is about cubic sand grains moving around on nicely packed columns in one dimension (the physical sand pile is two dimensional, but the support of sand columns is one dimensional). The Kadanoff Sand Pile Model is a discrete dynamical system describing the evolution of a finite number of stacked grains --as they would fall from an hourglass-- to a stable configuration. Grains move according to the repeated application of a simple local rule until reaching a stable configuration from which no rule can be applied, namely a fixed point. The main interest of the model relies in the difficulty of understanding its behavior, despite the simplicity of the rule. We are interested in describing the shape of fixed point configurations according to the number of initially stacked sand grains. In this paper, we prove the emergence of a wavy shape on fixed points, i.e., a regular pattern is (nearly) periodically repeated on fixed points. Interestingly, the regular pattern does not cover the entire fixed point, but eventually emerges from a seemingly highly disordered segment. Fortunately, the relative size of the part of fixed points non-covered by the pattern repetition is asymptotically null.
Year
Venue
Field
2013
CoRR
Pile,Discrete mathematics,Combinatorics,Finite set,Discrete dynamical system,Fixed point,Geometry,Mathematics
DocType
Volume
Citations 
Journal
abs/1301.0997
2
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.40
2
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Kevin Perrot1122.22
Eric Rémila232945.22