Transport in Sand Piles, Interface Depinning, and Earthquake Models
Abstract
Recent numerical results for a model describing dispersive transport in rice piles are explained by mapping the model to the depinning transition of an interface that is dragged at one end through a random medium. The average velocity of transport vanishes with system size L as <v> L2-D L-0.23, and the avalanche size distribution exponent τ= 2 - 1/D 1.55, where D 2.23 from interface depinning. We conjecture that the purely deterministic Burridge-Knopoff ``train'' model for earthquakes is in the same universality class.
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