EFFECT OF ANISOTROPY ON THE SELF-ORGANIZED CRITICAL STATE

We have performed computer simulations in order to investigate the effect of anisotropy in a continuous-energy model recently proposed by Y. C. Zhang [Phys. Rev. Lett. 63, 470 (1989)]. We have found that the most anisotropy-sensitive characteristic function is the peaked energy distribution, and the other quantities (critical exponents, etc.) are affected by the anisotropy in the extreme cases only. We present some quantitative connections between the anisotropy parameter and the characteristic quantities up to five dimensions. © 1990 The American Physical Society.