Description: This article discusses anomalous diffusion and ballistic peaks. Abstract: The quantum kicked rotor and the classical kicked rotor are both shown to have truncated Lévy distributions in momentum space, when the classical phase space has accelerator modes embedded in a chaotic sea. The survival probability for classical particles at the interface of an accelerator mode and the chaotic sea has an inverse power-law structure, whereas that for quantum particles has a periodically modulated inverse power law, with the period of oscillation being dependent on Planck's constant. These logarithmic oscillations are a renormalization group property that disappears as ħ → 0 in agreement with the correspondence principle.

Description: This article discusses fractional Brownian motion as a nonstationary process. Abstract: The long-range correlations in DNA sequences are currently interpreted as an example of stationary fractional Brownian motion (FBM). First the authors show that the dynamics of a dichotomous stationary process with long-range correlations such as that used to model DNA sequences should correspond to Lévy statistics and not to FBM. To explain why, in spite of this, the statistical analysis of the data seems to be compatible with FBM, the authors notice that an initial Gaussian condition, generated by a process foreign to the mechanism establishing the long-range correlations and consequently implying a departure from the stationary condition is maintained approximately unchanged for very long times. This is so because due to the nature itself of the long-range correlation process, it takes virtually an infinite time for the system to reach the genuine stationary state. Then the authors discuss a possible generator of initial Gaussian conditions, based on a folding mechanism of the nucleic acid in the cell nucleus. The model adopted is compatible with the known biological and physical constraints, namely, it is shown to be consistent with the information of current biological literature on folding as well ...

Description: This article discusses fractional calculus as a macroscopic manifestation of randomness. Abstract: We generalize the method of Van Hove [Physica (Amsterdam) 21, 517 (1955)] so as to deal with the case of nonordinary statistical mechanics, that being phenomena with no time-scale separation. We show that in the case of ordinary statistical mechanics, even if the adoption of the Van Hove method imposes randomness upon Hamiltonian dynamics, the resulting statistical process is described using normal calculus techniques. On the other hand, in the case where there is no time-scale separation, this generalized version of Van Hove's method not only imposes randomness upon the microscopic dynamics, but it also transmits randomness to the macroscopic level. As a result, the correct description of macroscopic dynamics has to be expressed in terms of the fractional calculus.

Description: This article discusses dynamic approach to the thermodynamics of superdiffusion. Abstract: We address the problem of relating thermodynamics to mechanics in the case of microscopic dynamics without a finite time scale. The solution is obtained by expressing the Tsallis entropic index q as a function of the Lévy index α, and using dynamic rather than probabilistic arguments.

Description: This article discusses the control of chaos in a CO2 laser. Abstract: We report the experimental control of chaos in an optically modulated CO2 laser. The CO2 laser was driven into chaos by injecting a feedback beam modulated by an electro-optical modulator. Control of chaos was achieved using a modified proportional feedback technique in which the control pulses were delayed by approximately one relaxation period. Using this technique, it was possible to control unstable periodic orbits up to period 6.