Sandpile solitons in higher dimensions (Q6093959)

This is certainly an important article for the theory of sandpiles, although quite technical and, apart from the introduction, is not an easy reading. Its purpose is to generalize and study the concept of a sandpile soliton, also referred to as a string, a state moving changelessly under the action of waves, to higher dimensions. In many ways, it is similar to the article [Commun. Math. Phys. 378, No. 3, 1649--1675 (2020; Zbl 1454.60142)] by the first author and the reviewer, dealing with the two-dimensional case. In both texts the key concept is the ``husking'' procedure (which was called ``smoothing'' in the previous article) that can be seen as a gradual process of decreasing an integer-valued superharmonic function (see Section 5), where at each step values are decreased by one along a subset of the lattice. The main result of the present article is that this process stabilizes if the function is a tropical polynomial (with integral coefficients) whose Newton polytope has only vertices as its lattice points. This could be turned into a criterium, i.e., a tropical polynomial not satisfying this condition has an infinite sequence of huskings which would decrease a coefficient corresponding to a lattice point of the Newton polytope which is not one of its vertices. The result of the husking, when it stabilizes, produces a soliton (or, more precisely, a combination of those) by taking the discrete Laplacian and adding it to the maximal stable state. A reader familiar with [loc. cit.] will find the last two chapters particularly interesting. Here new tricks specific to higher dimensions are introduced, however, going through the whole text might be necessary to understand them. Overall, solitons seem to be the most basic type of patterns in the sandpile model on a lattice, are instrumental in deriving certain scaling limit theorems, and seem to be present virtually in every fractal state, although the precise mechanism of their interactions with other types of patterns is yet to be understood. A must-read for everyone working in the field.