Self-Organized Criticality

• How to achieve scale-invariance?

  • Vicinity of critical point: power-laws
  • Very careful tuning of control parameter(s) required

• Another possibility: SOC

  • Sequence of avalanchesbetween metastable states
  • Continually driven to criticality
  • No external tuning required
  • Example: Bakís sand pile

WB & S. Pratt

PRE 54, R1009 (1996)

Finite-sizescaling

Held et al., PRL 65, 1120 (1990)

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