Reply to ``Comment on Conservative Force Fields in Nonextensive Kinetic Theory"

Abstract

It is shown that the comment by Costa and Meneses [1] did not point any technical or conceptual flaw in our paper titled ``Conservative Force Fields in Nonextensive Kinetic Theory" (Physica A 316, 289 (2002)). In particular, the application of the nonextensive distribution to the historical problem of the unbounded isothermal atmosphere under constant gravity is theoretically correct. It should be stressed that our solution is somewhat connected with a similar solution to a problem appearing in the astrophysical domain, namely, the so-called singular isothermal sphere. Actually, both problems are solved by a stationary Tsallis q-distribution with a "thermal cut-off" in the allowed values of the energy.