FLUCTUATIONS AND INTERMITTENCY IN FRAGMENT SIZE DISTRIBUTIONS

The intermittence signal on the size frequency of fragments found in various fragmenting systems is reconsidered. We believe that this signal, extracted from a factorial moment analysis, was incorrectly interpreted as a genuine intermittency. Indeed, the analysis in factorial moments made at fixed multiplicity, as it should be, reveals a total absence of proper intermittency in the size distribution. Moreover, in percolation theory this intermittency signal, which has often been claimed in the literature to signal a phase transition, vanishes when the size of the system tends to infinity. Our conclusion is that the signal found in earlier works and interpreted as an intermittency behaviour results from both the power law of the mean size fragment distribution and from the finite width of the multiplicity distribution. We conjecture that any partition of integers exhibiting these two features will provide a similar signal.