Spatiotemporal intermittency on the sandpile

Abstract

The self-organized critical state exhibited by a sandpile model is shown to correspond to motion on an attractor characterized by an invariant distribution of the conserved variable. The largest Lyapunov exponent is equal to zero. Yet over time scales of the order of the linear size of the system, the model displays intermittent chaos. The divergence of local histories is found to exhibit intermittency in both time and space.