We use a phenomenological field theory, reflecting the symmetries and conservation laws of sandpiles, to compare the driven dissipative sandpile, widely studied in the context of self-organized criticality, with the corresponding fixed-energy model. The latter displays an absorbing-state phase transition with upper critical dimension $d_c=4\mathrm{}$. We show that the driven model exhibits a fundamentally different approach to the critical point, and compute a subset of critical exponents. We present numerical simulations in support of our theoretical predictions.

• Received 18 June 1998

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.81.5676