Reply to “Comment on ‘Self-organized criticality and absorbing states: Lessons from the Ising model’ ”

In R. Dickman, M. A. Muñoz, A. Vespignani, and S. Zapperi [Braz. J. Phys. 30, 27 (2000)], Dickman et al. suggested that self-organized criticality can be produced by coupling the activity of an absorbing state model to a dissipation mechanism and adding an external drive. We analyzed the proposed mechanism in G. Pruessner and O. Peters [Phys. Rev. E 73, 025106(R) (2006)] and found that if this mechanism is at work, the finite-size scaling found in self-organized criticality will depend on the details of the implementation of dissipation and driving. In the preceding paper [M. J. Alava, L. Laurson, A. Vespignani, and S. Zapperi, Phys. Rev. E 77, 048101 (2008)], Alava et al. show that one avalanche exponent in the absorbing state approach becomes independent of dissipation and driving. In our reply we clarify their findings and put them in the context of the original paper.