Zipf's law in Nuclear Multifragmentation and Percolation Theory

Abstract

We investigate the average sizes of the $n$ largest fragments in nuclear multifragmentation events near the critical point of the nuclear matter phase diagram. We perform analytic calculations employing Poisson statistics as well as Monte Carlo simulations of the percolation type. We find that previous claims of manifestations of Zipf's Law in the rank-ordered fragment size distributions are not born out in our result, neither in finite nor infinite systems. Instead, we find that Zipf-Mandelbrot distributions are needed to describe the results, and we show how one can derive them in the infinite size limit. However, we agree with previous authors that the investigation of rank-ordered fragment size distributions is an alternative way to look for the critical point in the nuclear matter diagram.

8 pages, 11 figures, submitted to PRC

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Zipf's law from a Fisher variational-principle
• Fisher-information and the thermodynamics of scale-invariant systems
• Exact solution of bond percolation on small arbitrary graphs
• An exact formula for percolation on higher-order cycles
• Distributions of the largest fragment size in multifragmentation: Traces of a phase transition