Entropic upper bound on gravitational binding energy

C. Vignat, A. Plastino and A.R. Plastino

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2011, vol. 390, issue 13, 2491-2496

Abstract: We prove that the gravitational binding energy Ω of a self gravitating system described by a mass density distribution ρ(x) admits an upper bound B[ρ(x)] given by a simple function of an appropriate, non-additive Tsallis’ power-law entropic functional Sq evaluated on the density ρ. The density distributions that saturate the entropic bound have the form of isotropic q-Gaussian distributions. These maximizer distributions correspond to the Plummer density profile, well-known in astrophysics. A heuristic scaling argument is advanced suggesting that the entropic bound B[ρ(x)] is unique, in the sense that it is unlikely that exhaustive entropic upper bounds not based on the alluded Sq entropic measure exit. The present findings provide a new link between the physics of self gravitating systems, on one hand, and the statistical formalism associated with non-additive, power-law entropic measures, on the other hand.

Keywords: Tsallis’ statistics; Gravitation; Entropic bound to binding energy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:390:y:2011:i:13:p:2491-2496

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2011.02.042

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