Breakdown of self-organized criticality

Abstract

We introduce two sandpile models which show the same behavior of real sandpiles, that is, an almost self-organized critical behavior for small systems and the dominance of large avalanches as the system size increases. The systems become fully self-organized critical, with the critical exponents of the Bak, Tang and Wiesenfeld model, as the system parameters are changed, showing that these systems can make a bridge between the well known theoretical and numerical results and what is observed in real experiments. We find that a simple mechanism determines the boundary where self-organized can or cannot exist, which is the presence of local chaos.