The concept of percolation is combined with a self-consistent treatment of
the interaction between the dynamics on a lattice and the external drive. Such
a treatment can provide a mechanism by which the system evolves to criticality
without fine tuning, thus offering a route to self-organized criticality (SOC)
which in many cases is more natural than the weak random drive combined with
boundary loss/dissipation as used in standard sand-pile formulations. We
introduce a new metaphor, the e-pile model, and a formalism for electric
conduction in random media to compute critical exponents for such a system.
Variations of the model apply to a number of other physical problems, such as
electric plasma discharges, dielectric relaxation, and the dynamics of the
Earth's magnetotail.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure
