Realistic time correlations in sandpiles

Instituut voor Theoretische Fysica, K. U. Leuven - Celestijnenlaan 200D B-3001 Leuven, Belgium

Received: 6 February 2006
Accepted: 20 June 2006

Abstract

A “sandpile” cellular automaton achieves complex temporal correlations, like a spectrum, if the position where it is perturbed diffuses slowly rather than changing completely at random, showing that the spatial correlations of the driving are deeply related to the intermittent activity. Hence, recent arguments excluding the relevance of self-organized criticality in seismicity and in other contexts are inaccurate. As a toy model of single fault evolution, and despite of its simplicity, our automaton uniquely reproduces the scaling form of the broad distributions of waiting times between earthquakes.