Fixed-energy sandpiles belong generically to directed percolation.

Fixed-energy sandpiles with stochastic update rules are known to exhibit a nonequilibrium phase transition from an active phase into infinitely many absorbing states. Examples include the conserved Manna model, the conserved lattice gas, and the conserved threshold transfer process. It is believed that the transitions in these models belong to an autonomous universality class of nonequilibrium phase transitions, the so-called Manna class. Contrarily, the present numerical study of selected (1+1)-dimensional models in this class suggests that their critical behavior converges to directed percolation after very long time, questioning the existence of an independent Manna class.

Dependence of asymptotic decay exponents on initial condition and the resulting scaling violation.

There are several examples which show that the critical exponents can be dependent on the initial condition of the system. In such situations, there are many systems where various issues related to the universal behavior, e.g., the existence of universality, the splitting of the universality class, scaling violations, whether the initial dependence should persist even after a sufficiently long time or is a transient effect, the reasons for such features, etc. are not yet quite clear. In this article, with the simple example of the conserved lattice gas model (CLG), we investigate such issues and clearly show that under certain situations the asymptotic decay exponents are, in fact, dependent on the initial condition of the system. We show that such an effect arises because of the existence of two competing time scales and identify the initial conditions which capture the universal features of the system.