Presence of chaos in a self-organized critical system

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Abstract
We investigate a one-dimensional chain of blocks and springs driven on a surface with friction. We find, as the number of blocks N increases, the system has a power law dependence of the size of slipping events, characteristic of self-organized criticality. The largest Liapunov exponent also increases with increasing N, approaching an asymptotic value at large N. Thus, contrary to a previous conjecture [P. Bak and C. Tang, J. Geophys. Res. B 94, 15635 (1989)], strong chaos (positive Liapunov exponent) and self-organized criticality can coexist. © 1996 The American Physical Society.