Scaling laws and universality in the choice of election candidates

Nowadays there is an increasing interest of physicists in finding regularities related to social phenomena. This interest is clearly motivated by applications that a statistical mechanical description of the human behavior may have in our society. By using this framework, we address this work to cover an open question related to elections: the choice of elections candidates (candidature process). Our analysis reveals that, apart from the social motivations, this system displays features of traditional out-of-equilibrium physical phenomena such as scale-free statistics and universality. Basically, we found a non-linear (power law) mean correspondence between the number of candidates and the size of the electorate (number of voters), and also that this choice has a multiplicative underlying process (lognormal behavior). The universality of our findings is supported by data from 16 elections from 5 countries. In addition, we show that aspects of network scale-free can be connected to this universal behavior.Comment: Accepted for publication in EP

Extensive Characterization of Seismic Laws in Acoustic Emissions of Crumpled Plastic Sheets

Statistical similarities between earthquakes and other systems that emit cracking noises have been explored in diverse contexts, ranging from materials science to financial and social systems. Such analogies give promise of a unified and universal theory for describing the complex responses of those systems. There are, however, very few attempts to simultaneously characterize the most fundamental seismic laws in such systems. Here we present a complete description of the Gutenberg-Richter law, the recurrence times, Omori's law, the productivity law, and Bath's law for the acoustic emissions that happen in the relaxation process of uncrumpling thin plastic sheets. Our results show that these laws also appear in this phenomenon, but (for most cases) with different parameters from those reported for earthquakes and fracture experiments. This study thus contributes to elucidate the parallel between seismic laws and cracking noises in uncrumpling processes, revealing striking qualitative similarities but also showing that these processes display unique features.Comment: Accepted for publication in EP

Parity doublers in chiral potential quark models

The effect of spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry over the spectrum of highly excited hadrons is addressed in the framework of a microscopic chiral potential quark model (Generalised Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model) with a vectorial instantaneous quark kernel of a generic form. A heavy-light quark-antiquark bound system is considered, as an example, and the Lorentz nature of the effective light-quark potential is identified to be a pure Lorentz-scalar, for low-lying states in the spectrum, and to become a pure spatial Lorentz vector, for highly excited states. Consequently, the splitting between the partners in chiral doublets is demonstrated to decrease fast in the upper part of the spectrum so that neighboring states of an opposite parity become almost degenerate. A detailed microscopic picture of such a "chiral symmetry restoration" in the spectrum of highly excited hadrons is drawn and the corresponding scale of restoration is estimated.Comment: LaTeX2e, 4 pages, uses aipproc class, Talk given by A.Nefediev at the conference "Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum VII", 2-7 September 2006, Acores, Portugal, to appear in Proceeding

Generalized Chaplygin gas with α=0\alpha = 0 and the ΛCDM\Lambda CDM cosmological model

The generalized Chaplygin gas model is characterized by the equation of state $p = - \frac{A}{\rho^\alpha}$. It is generally stated that the case $\alpha = 0$ is equivalent to a model with cosmological constant and dust ($\Lambda CDM$). In this work we show that, if this is true for the background equations, this is not true for the perturbation equations. Hence, the mass spectrum predicted for both models may differ.Comment: Latex file, 4 pages, 2 figures in eps forma

Confinement and parity doubling in heavy-light mesons

In this paper, we study the chiral symmetry restoration in the hadronic spectrum in the framework of generalised Nambu-Jona-Lasinio quark models with instantaneous confining quark kernels. We investigate a heavy-light quarkonium and derive its bound-state equation in the form of a Schroedingerlike equation and, after the exact inverse Foldy-Wouthuysen transformation, in the form of a Diraclike quation. We discuss the Lorentz nature of confinement for such a system and demonstrate explicitly the effective chiral symmetry restoration for highly excited states in the mesonic spectrum. We give an estimate for the scale of this restoration.Comment: RevTeX4, 21 pages, 6 Postscript figures, uses epsfig.sty, to appear in Phys.Rev.