Sandpile models and spanning trees

07.06.2023, 10:00  –  Campus Golm, Haus 9, Raum 0.17 (und online)
Forschungsseminar Wahrscheinlichkeitstheorie

Wioletta Ruszel (Univ. Utrecht)

The sandpile model (aka chip-firing game) is a toy model for studying self-organized criticality (SOC). SOC models are characterized by displaying power-law probability behaviour of certain quantities without fine-tuning any parameter.   
There has been a lot of activity and progress in understanding connections to spanning trees, Abelian groups, studying existence of infinite volume measures or avalanche size distributions of the model on different lattices.
In this talk we will discuss the basic model on Z^2, show how it is related to spanning trees and discuss special configurations called height-one configurations. If time permits, we will indicate how those configurations are related to specific fields from logarithmic conformal field theory.

The Zoom-access data are available here.