Additivity property and emergence of power laws in nonequilibrium steady states

Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2015 Nov;92(5):052107. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.92.052107. Epub 2015 Nov 6.

Abstract

We show that an equilibriumlike additivity property can remarkably lead to power-law distributions observed frequently in a wide class of out-of-equilibrium systems. The additivity property can determine the full scaling form of the distribution functions and the associated exponents. The asymptotic behavior of these distributions is solely governed by branch-cut singularity in the variance of subsystem mass. To substantiate these claims, we explicitly calculate, using the additivity property, subsystem mass distributions in a wide class of previously studied mass aggregation models as well as in their variants. These results could help in the thermodynamic characterization of nonequilibrium critical phenomena.