Statistical Mechanical Foundations for Systems with Nonexponential Distributions

Abstract

Traditionally the exponential canonical distributions of Gibbsian statistical mechanics are given theoretical justification in at least four different ways: steepest descent method, counting method, Khinchin's method based on te central limit theorem, and maximum entropy principle of Jaynes. Equally ubiquitous power-law canonical distributions are shown to be given similar justification by appropriately adopting these formulations.