Limiting Shapes for Deterministic Centrally Seeded Growth Models

We study the rotor router model and two deterministic sandpile models. For the rotor router model in ℤ d , Levine and Peres proved that the limiting shape of the growth cluster is a sphere. For the other two models, only bounds in dimension 2 are known. A unified approach for these models with a new parameter h (the initial number of particles at each site), allows to prove a number of new limiting shape results in any dimension d≥1. For the rotor router model, the limiting shape is a sphere for all values of h. For one of the sandpile models, and h=2d−2 (the maximal value), the limiting shape is a cube. For both sandpile models, the limiting shape is a sphere in the limit h→−∞. Finally, we prove that the rotor router shape contains a diamond.