Nonextensive Statistical Mechanics -applications to Nuclear and High Energy Physics *

A variety of phenomena in nuclear and high energy physics seemingly do not satisfy the basic hypothesis for possible stationary states to be of the type covered by Boltzmann-Gibbs (BG) statistical mechanics. More specifically, the system appears to relax, along time, on macroscopic states which violate the ergodic assumption. Some of these phenomena appear to follow, instead, the prescriptions of nonextensive statistical mechanics. In the same manner that the BG formalism is based on the entropy SBG = −k ∑ i pi ln pi, the nonextensive one is based on the form Sq = k(1 − ∑ i p q i )/(q − 1) (with ∗To appear in the Proceedings of the X International Workshop on Multiparticle Production Correlations and Fluctuations in QCD (8-15 June 2002, Crete), ed. N. Antoniou (World Scientific, Singapore, 2003) †[email protected], [email protected]