Spatial Power-Law Distribution

The most important property of the self-organized critical state is the presence of locally connected domains of all sizes. Since a given perturbation of the state 77 can lead to anything from a trivial one-site shift to a lattice-wide avalanche, there are no characteristic length scales in the system. Bak, et al. [bak87] have, in fact, found that the distribution function D s) of domains of size s obeys the power law 

Note that while the power-law distribution is reminiscent of that observed in equilibrium thermodynamic systems near a second-order phase transition, the mechanism behind it is quite different. Here the critical state is effectively an attractor of the system, and no external fields are involved. 

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