Fillips in Sandpiles; Spanning Avalanches, Bifurcation and Temporal oscillations

Abstract

The manipulation of the self-organized critical systems by repeatedly deliberate local relaxations (fillips) affect considerably the dynamics of avalanches and change their evolution. During a fillip, the energy diffuses to the neighboring regions, causing a smoothening of the height filed over the system. The fillips are controlled by a parameter $\zeta$ which is related to the number of local smoothening events in an avalanche. The system shows a new (mass and time) scales, leading to some oscillatory behaviors. A bifurcation occurs at some $\zeta$ value, above which some oscillations occur in the mean energy, and also in the autocorrelation functions. These oscillations are associated with \textit{spanning avalanches} which are due to the accumulation of energy in the smoothed system. The analysis of the rare event waiting time (REWT) confirms also the appearance of this new time scale. A mean field analysis is presented to explain some results.