Statistical Mechanical Foundations for Systems with Nonexponential   Distributions
  Traditionally the exponential canonical distributions of Gibbsian statistical mechanics are given theoretical justification in at least four different ways: steepest descent method, counting method, Khinchin's method based on te central limit theorem, and maximum entropy principle of Jaynes. Equally ubiquitous power-law canonical distributions are shown to be given similar justification by appropriately adopting these formulations. 
A. K. Rajagopal (1) and Sumiyoshi Abe (2)((1)Naval Research   Laboratory, Washington, DC (2)College of Science and Technolog...