Harmonic dynamics of the abelian sandpile.

The abelian sandpile is a cellular automaton which serves as the archetypical model to study self-organized criticality, a phenomenon occurring in various biological, physical, and social processes. Its recurrent configurations form an abelian group, whose identity is a fractal composed of self-similar patches. Here, we analyze the evolution of the sandpile identity under harmonic fields of different orders.