1/f± noise in dissipative transport

Motivated by the hypothesis that self-organized criticality is a common source of 1/f noise, we construct and analyze a class of nonlinear nonequilibrium models describing the dissipative dynamics of interacting particles injected stochastically at the system boundaries. We show that such noisy boundary problems may be analyzed by renormalization-group methods and find that the noise spectrum for the particle number is 1/f in all dimensions in the absence of an external driving force or noise. Addition of such a force or of bulk noise changes the spectrum to 1/f2, or 1/f3/2, respectively. These results explain several recent numerical experiments on dissipative transport. © 1992 The American Physical Society.