The Olami-Feder-Christensen earthquake model in one dimension

TL;DR

This paper investigates the one-dimensional Olami-Feder-Christensen earthquake model, revealing how its earthquake size distribution evolves with system size and identifying multiple attractor types with synchronized regions.

Contribution

It provides new insights into the dynamics and attractor structures of the 1D OFC earthquake model, especially regarding size distribution and synchronization phenomena.

Findings

Small system sizes show power-law earthquake distributions.

Larger systems exhibit a split in earthquake sizes into small avalanches and system-sized events.

Four distinct attractor types are identified, including synchronized regions.

Abstract

We study the earthquake model by Olami, Feder and Christensen in one dimension. While the size distribution of earthquakes resembles a power law for small system sizes, it splits for larger system sizes into two parts, one comprising small avalanches and showing a size independent cutoff, and the other comprising avalanches of the order of the system size. We identify four different types of attractors of the dynamics of the system which already exist for very small systems. For larger system sizes, these attractors contain large synchronized regions.