The Bak-Chen-Tang Forest Fire Model Revisited

Abstract

We reconsider a model introduced by Bak, Chen, and Tang (Phys. Rev. A 38, 364 (1988)) as a supposedly self-organized critical model for forest fires. We verify again that the model is not critical in 2 dimensions, as found also by previous authors. But we find that the model does show anomalous scaling (i.e., is critical in the sense of statistical mechanics) in 3 and 4 dimensions. We relate these results to recent claims by A. Johansen.