Passive Sliders and Scaling: from Cusps to Divergences

The steady state reached by a system of particles sliding down a fluctuating surface has interesting properties. Particle clusters form and break rapidly, leading to a broad distribution of sizes and large fluctuations. The density-density correlation function is a singular scaling function of the separation and system size. A simple mapping is shown to take a configuration of sliding hard-core particles with mutual exclusion (a system which shows a cusp singularity) to a configuration with multiparticle occupancy. For the mapped system, a calculation of the correlation function shows that it is of the same scaling form again, but with a stronger singularity (a divergence) of the sort observed earlier for noninteracting passive particles.