Convergence of the abelian sandpile (Q1949157)

The abelian sandpile growth model, which is a diffusion process for configurations of chips placed on vertices of the \(d\)-dimensional integer lattice \(\mathbb{Z}^d\) is studied. In particular, the authors show that the rescaled sandpiles \(\bar{s}_n(x):= s_n(n^{1/d}x)\) converge weakly-\(*\) to a function \(s \in L^{\infty}(\mathbb R^d)\). This limit is characterized in terms of the solution to the Laplacian of an elliptic obstacle problem. The authors show that weak-\(*\) convergence is the right notion of convergence for this problem. The proof is based on PDE techniques and an appropriate least action principle.