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American Physical Society, Physical review E: Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics, 6(75), 2007

DOI: 10.1103/physreve.75.061114

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Origin of power-law distributions in deterministic walks: The influence of landscape geometry

This paper is available in a repository.
This paper is available in a repository.

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Abstract

We investigate the properties of a deterministic walk, whose locomotion rule is always to travel to the nearest site. Initially the sites are randomly distributed in a closed rectangular (ALxL) landscape and, once reached, they become unavailable for future visits. As expected, the walker step lengths present characteristic scales in one (L-->0) and two (AL approximately L) dimensions. However, we find scale invariance for an intermediate geometry, when the landscape is a thin striplike region. This result is induced geometrically by a dynamical trapping mechanism, leading to a power-law distribution for the step lengths. The relevance of our findings in broader contexts--of both deterministic and random walks--is also briefly discussed.