On the interpretation of "off the edge" avalanches

TL;DR

This paper investigates the relationship between off the edge and internal avalanches in sandpile models, revealing that off the edge events do not follow power-law distributions unlike internal avalanches, impacting the interpretation of experimental data.

Contribution

It provides experimental and theoretical analysis showing that off the edge avalanche distributions differ from internal ones in self-organized critical systems.

Findings

Internal avalanches follow power-law distributions with system dimension exponents.

Off the edge avalanches do not follow power laws but exhibit different scaling relations.

Results impact the interpretation of experimental avalanche data in SOC systems.

Abstract

We establish both experimentally and theoretically the relation between off the edge and internal avalanches in a sandpile model, a central issue in the interpretation of most experiments in these systems. In BTW simulations and also in the experiments the size distributions of internal avalanches show power laws and critical exponents related with the dimension of the system. We show that, in a SOC scenario, the distributions of off the edge avalanches do not show power laws but follow scaling relations with critical exponents different from their analogous for the internal avalanche distributions.