Threshold state and a conjecture of Poghosyan, Poghosyan, Priezzhev and Ruelle (Q2339177)

This paper is devoted to the analytical prove of a precise relationship between the threshold state of the fixed-energy sandpile and the stationary state of Dhar's abelian sandpile, especially for the limit when the initial condition \(s_0\rightarrow -\infty\). The question whether and how these two states are related has been an important problem since 2000. The author proves that when \(s_0\rightarrow -\infty\) the total amount of sand in the threshold state converges in distribution to the total amount of sand in the stationary state, confirming a conjecture of Poghosyan, Poghosyan, Priezzhev and Ruelle (PPPR). The whole paper is divided into six sections. In the introduction we have a statement of the important question: ``How much memory does a critical system retain of its pre-critical past?'' This is an important issue since the stationary density of the abelian sandpile \(\zeta_s\) should equal the threshold density of the fixed energy sandpile \(\zeta_\tau\). In the literature, there are some results showing that \(\zeta_\tau\approx2.125288\), whereas \(\zeta_s\approx 2.125\) thus \(\zeta_\tau\neq\zeta_s\). In the paper preliminaries, we have an analysis of possible approaches to this problem with a proposal of the main theorem and corollaries. Section 2 shows the \(z\)-recurrent decomposition as an important tool in proposed analysis of open and closed chains. Basing on its results, Section 3 shows the application of the Markov renewal theorem to a variant of the open chain. This allows to make a proof (Section 4) of the proposed theorem. The remaining two sections show possible applications of the obtained results.