Some fractal aspects of Self-Organized Criticality

The concept of Self-Organized Criticality (SOC) was proposed in an attempt to explain the widespread appearance of power-law in nature. It describes a mechanism in which a system reaches spontaneously a state where the characteristic events (avalanches) are distributed according to a power law. We present a dynamical systems approach to Self-Organized Criticality where the dynamics is described either in terms of Iterated Function Systems, or as a piecewise hyperbolic dynamical system of skew-product type. Some results linking the structure of the attractor and some characteristic properties of avalanches are discussed.