Self-organized Criticality and Absorbing States: Lessons from the Ising Model

We investigate a suggested path to self-organized criticality. Originally, this path was devised to "generate criticality" in systems displaying an absorbing-state phase transition, but closer examination of the mechanism reveals that it can be used for any continuous phase transition. We used the Ising model as well as the Manna model to demonstrate how the finite-size scaling exponents depend on the tuning of driving and dissipation rates with system size.Our findings limit the explanatory power of the mechanism to non-universal critical behavior.