Solitons in the one-dimensional forest fire model

Abstract

Fires in the one-dimensional Bak-Chen-Tang forest fire model propagate as solitons, resembling shocks in Burgers turbulence. The branching of solitons, creating new fires, is balanced by the pairwise annihilation of oppositely moving solitons. Two distinct, diverging length scales appear in the limit where the growth rate of trees, p, vanishes. The width of the solitons, w, diverges as a powe law, 1/p, while the average distance between solitons diverges much faster as d ∼ exp(π2/12P).