Our new research work got published in the EPL (Europhysics Letters): 

• R.C. Batac, Clustering regimes in a sandpile with targeted triggering, EPL (Europhysics Letters) 135, 19003, DOI:10.1209/0295-5075/135/19003  (2021). 

The work presents the statistics of the generalized space-time distance between events in a sandpile-based model of earthquakes proposed in a previous work. By introducing a probability to target the most susceptible site in the sandpile, the model has recovered clustering regimes of correlated activity, similar to the behavior of actual earthquakes. Other signatures of seismicity emerged naturally in the model, including spatial "fault" patterns and the physical clustering of events near the strongest ones. 

The work therefore bridges the sandpile, the paradigm model of self-organized criticality (SOC), and earthquakes, long considered to be representative examples of SOC in nature.  

Dr. Rene Batac has worked on landslides, earthquakes, and other large-scale phenomena in nature deemed to be exhibiting self-organization. This work is part of his efforts to analyze and statistically model seismic data from the Philippines.