title: Confirming and extending the hypothesis of universality in sandpiles.
abstract: Stochastic sandpiles self-organize to an absorbing-state critical point with scaling behavior different from directed percolation (DP) and characterized by the presence of an additional conservation law. This is usually called the C-DP or Manna universality class. There remains, however, an exception to this universality principle: a sandpile automaton introduced by Maslov and Zhang, which was claimed to be in the DP class despite the existence of a conservation law. We show, by means of careful numerical simulations as well as by constructing and analyzing a field theory, that (contrarily to what was previously thought) this sandpile is also in the C-DP or Manna class. This confirms the hypothesis of universality for stochastic sandpiles and gives rise to a fully coherent picture of self-organized criticality in systems with conservation. In passing, we obtain a number of results for the C-DP class and introduce a strategy to easily discriminate between DP and C-DP scaling.
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Electromagnetismo y Física de la Materia and Instituto de Física Teórica y Computacional Carlos I, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de Granada, Granada, Spain.
authors.forename: Juan A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Bonachela
authors.forename: Miguel A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Muñoz