Power-law statistics and universal scaling in the absence of criticality

摘要

Critical states are sometimes identified experimentally through power-law statistics or universal scalingfunctions. We show here that such features naturally emerge from networks in self-sustained irregular regimesaway from criticality. In these regimes, statistical physics theory of large interacting systems predict a regimewhere the nodes have independent and identically distributed dynamics. We thus investigated the statistics of asystem in which units are replaced by independent stochastic surrogates and found the same power-law statistics,indicating that these are not sufficient to establish criticality.We rather suggest that these are universal features oflarge-scale networks when considered macroscopically. These results put caution on the interpretation of scalinglaws found in nature.