Temporal extensivity of Tsallis' entropy and the bound on entropy production rate

The Tsallis entropy, which is a generalization of the Boltzmann-Gibbs entropy, plays a central role in nonextensive statistical mechanics of complex systems. A lot of efforts have recently been made on establishing a dynamical foundation for the Tsallis entropy. They are primarily concerned with nonlinear dynamical systems at the edge of chaos. Here, it is shown by generalizing a formulation of thermostatistics based on time averages recently proposed by Carati [A. Carati, Physica A 348, 110 (2005)] that, whenever relevant, the Tsallis entropy indexed by q is temporally extensive: linear growth in time, i.e., finite entropy production rate. Then, the universal bound on the entropy production rate is shown to be 1/|1–q|. The property of the associated probabilistic process, i.e., the sojourn time distribution, determining randomness of motion in phase space is also analyzed.

©2006 The American Physical Society