Inertia and break of self-organized criticality in sandpile cellular-automata models.

We present a sandpile cellular-automata model that includes the effects of inertia. The model is studied in both one and two dimensions. We find that the model changes the normal self-organized critical behavior, creating a dominance of big events in the system and leading to very large fluctuations in the mass of the system. We show that those changes of behavior can only be noticed in large sandpiles, which is in accord with previous experimental results.