Avalanche activity noises in sandpile models

Abstract

We consider the Bak-Tang-Wiesenfeld (BTW) and the Manna sandpile models of self-organized criticality. In the models, previous studies revealed a signature of long-range temporal correlations in the avalanche activity. We examine the power spectra of the noises with different system sizes and find that the power spectrum for a finite-size system exhibits three distinct frequency regimes: (i) a frequency-independent behavior below a lower cutoff frequency, (ii) a hump-type behavior in the intermediate-frequency regime, and (iii) a power-law scaling $1/f^{\alpha}$ in the high-frequency regime. The power scales with the system size in all regimes, but with different exponents. Also, the lower cutoff and peak frequencies decay in a power-law manner with the system size. We apply finite-size scaling and obtain data collapse for the power spectra, corroborating the estimation of the scaling exponents. Our studies reveal subtle scaling features for the temporal correlation within the avalanches.