Structure and statistical organization of the stationary state of the Oslo model

Abstract In most driven-dissipative sandpile models, the dynamics of the system reach a critical stationary state. This state displays organization features such as a power-law avalanche spectrum and hyperuniformity, but these features often emerge without a clear path from the microscopic evolution rules. Only in a few cases is there an available description of the stationary state; in other sandpile models the question is open. In this article, we present our results on the stationary state of the Oslo model (OM), a driven-dissipative sandpile model with intrinsic randomness. In order to do so, we use different representations of the system configurations and of the dynamical process. Moving back and forth between these representations allows us to identify invariant quantities for each configurations. Moreover, we obtain a detailed statistical description of the stationary state by considering all paths leading to a given configuration at once, and by summing their contributions under the constraint specified by the invariants. As a result, we find that the configurations of the stationary state are structured into a small number of equivalence classes, and that their statistical weights are related to the counting of colored diagrams respecting a small set of rules.