Asymptotics of superstatistics

Hugo Touchette, Christian Beck

Published 2004-08-04, updated 2005-01-26Version 2

Superstatistics are superpositions of different statistics relevant for driven nonequilibrium systems with spatiotemporal inhomogeneities of an intensive variable (e.g., the inverse temperature). They contain Tsallis statistics as a special case. We develop here a technique that allows us to analyze the large energy asymptotics of the stationary distributions of general superstatistics. A saddle-point approximation is developed which relates this problem to a variational principle. Several examples are worked out in detail.