Abelian Sandpiles on Cylinders

Abstract

We study here a variant of the Abelian Sandpile Model, where the playground is a cylinder of width $w$ and of circumference c. When c << w, we describe a phenomenon which has not been observed in other geometries: the probability distribution of avalanche sizes has a ladder structure, with the first step consisting of avalanches of size up to w c/2 that are essentially equiprobable, except for a small exponential tail of order about 10c. We explain this phenomenon and describe subsequent steps.