, Volume 63, Issue 3-4, pp 685-700

On a forest fire model with supposed self-organized criticality

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Abstract

We study a stochastic forest fire model introduced by P. Baket al. as a model showing self-organized criticality. This model involves a growth parameterp, and the criticality is supposed to show up in the limitp→0. By simulating the model on much larger lattices, and with much smaller values ofp, we find that the correlations with longest range do not show a nontrivial critical phenomenon in this limit, though we cannot rule out percolation-like critical behavior on a smaller but still divergent length scale. In contrast, the model shows nontrivialdeterministic evolution over time scales ≫1/p in the limitp→0.