{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/laplacian-growth-sandpiles-on-the-sierpinski","title":"Laplacian growth & sandpiles on the Sierpinski gasket: limit shape universality and exact solutions","arxiv_id":"1807.08748","date":"2018-07-23","proceeding":null,"authors":["Joe P. Chen","Jonah Kudler-Flam"],"abstract":"We establish quantitative spherical shape theorems for rotor-router aggregation and abelian sandpile growth on the graphical Sierpinski gasket ($SG$) when particles are launched from the corner vertex. In particular, the abelian sandpile growth problem is exactly solved via a recursive construction of self-similar sandpile tiles. We show that sandpile growth and patterns exhibit a $(2\\cdot 3^n)$-periodicity as a function of the initial mass. Moreover, the cluster explodes---increments by more than 1 in radius---at periodic intervals, a phenomenon not seen on $\\mathbb{Z}^d$ or trees. We explicitly characterize all the radial jumps, and use the renewal theorem to prove the scaling limit of the cluster radius, which satisfies a power law modulated by log-periodic oscillations. In the course of our proofs we also establish structural identities of the sandpile groups of subgraphs of $SG$ with two different boundary conditions, notably the corresponding identity elements conjectured by Fairchild, Haim, Setra, Strichartz, and Westura. Our main theorems, in conjunction with recent results of Chen, Huss, Sava-Huss, and Teplyaev, establish $SG$ as a positive example of a state space which exhibits \"limit shape universality,\" in the sense of Levine and Peres, among the four Laplacian growth models: divisible sandpiles, abelian sandpiles, rotor-router aggregation, and internal diffusion-limited aggregation (IDLA). We conclude the paper with conjectures about radial fluctuations in IDLA on $SG$, possible extensions of limit shape universality to other state spaces, and related open problems.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.08748v4","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1807.08748v4.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"laplacian-growth-sandpiles-on-the-sierpinski","repo_url":"https://github.com/jkudlerflam/AutomataSG","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}