Superstatistics

We consider nonequilibrium systems with complex dynamics in stationary states with large fluctuations of intensive quantities (e.g. the temperature, chemical potential or energy dissipation) on long time scales. Depending on the statistical properties of the fluctuations, we obtain different effective statistical mechanical descriptions. Tsallis statistics follows from a chi(2)-distribution of an intensive variable, but other classes of generalized statistics are obtained as well. We show that for small variance of the fluctuations all these different statistics behave in a universal way. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.