  The Abelian sandpile process evolves configurations of chips on the integer
lattice by toppling any vertex with at least 4 chips, distributing one of its
chips to each of its 4 neighbors. When begun from a large stack of chips, the
terminal state of the sandpile has a curious fractal structure which has
remained unexplained. Using a characterization of the quadratic growths
attainable by integer-superharmonic functions, we prove that the sandpile PDE
recently shown to characterize the scaling limit of the sandpile admits certain
fractal solutions, giving a precise mathematical perspective on the fractal
nature of the sandpile.
