Results of an experimental investigation of the scaling properties of a collapsing rice pile induced by reducing the length of the base support of the pile are reported. It is found that two angles of repose are needed to describe the shape of the collapsing granular pile. Corresponding to these...

We present some analytical results for the stochastic sandpile model studied earlier by Manna. In this model, the operators corresponding to particle addition at different sites commute. The eigenvalues of operators satisfy a system of coupled polynomial equations. For an L×L square, we...

We develop a parsimonious model of the interbank payment system. The model incorporates an endogenous instruction arrival process, a scale-free topology of payments between banks, a fixed total liquidity which limits banks’ capacity to process arriving instructions, and a global market that...

We study the spin-1 Ising model with non-local constraints imposed by the Bak–Tang–Wiesenfeld sandpile model of self-organized criticality (SOC). The model is constructed as if the sandpile is being built on a (honeycomb) lattice with Ising interactions. In this way we combine two models...

The nature of self-organized criticality (SOC) is pin-pointed with a simple mechanical model: a pinball machine. Its phase space is fully parameterized by two integer variables, one describing the state of an on-going game, the other describing the state of the machine. This is the simplest...