Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications: Editorial

There is a diffuse belief in the scientific community that thermal statistics of any physical system must satisfy the prescriptions of the Boltzmann–Gibbs (BG) statistical mechanics and its associated thermodynamics. This is not correct: in spite of the ubiquitous and impressive success of the BG formalism,a constantly increasing amount of physical situations are known nowadays which do not comply with the standard expectations. These anomalous features seem to be due to violations of the standard ergodic and mixing properties,on which the BG formalism is founded.