Power laws in elementary and heavy-ion collisions - A story of fluctuations and nonextensivity?

Abstract

We review from the point of view of nonextensive statistics the ubiquitous presence in elementary and heavy-ion collisions of power-law distributions. Special emphasis is placed on the conjecture that this is just a reflection of some intrinsic fluctuations existing in the hadronic systems considered. These systems summarily described by a single parameter q playing the role of a nonextensivity measure in the nonextensive statistical models based on Tsallis entropy.