Self-organized criticality with and without conservation

The self-organized sandpile models lose criticality if dissipation is introduced. Recently Christensen et al. have shown that dissipative automata based on the Burridge-Knopoff earthquake model exhibit critical behavior. Criticality is qualitatively different for the cases with and without conservation: A new characteristic length appears for the dissipative case which diverges slower than the system size. For all dissipative models we have found a characteristic frequency in the power spectrum of the released energy, which is absent for the conservative case. The exponents describing criticality change continuously as a function of the strength of dissipation and crossover phenomena occur in the vicinity of conservation. Disorder is irrelevant if conservation is present while it destroys criticality in the dissipative case.