Regensburg 2010 – scientific programme

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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 7: Stochastic processes, brownian motion, and transport

DY 7.8: Talk

Tuesday, March 23, 2010, 11:30–11:45, H46

Record statistics in improving populations — •Gregor Wergen and Joachim Krug — Institut für Theoretische Physik, Universität zu Köln

Record breaking events are relevant in many different areas of research. For instance in climatology records are important events which are often mentioned in current media coverage. Also in biology, economy or sports, records can be interesting. In most cases where records appear there is always the question if a record occurred just by chance or because of a real improvement. We considered the statistics of record-breaking events for random variables from distributions with an increasing mean value. While the statistics of records in time-independent and uncorrelated time-series is understood quite well, there are a lot of open questions for record events from distributions that are not-stationary. We derive a general expression for the probability for a record-breaking event in the case of an underlying distribution with a small linear drift. This expression can be evaluated for various elementary distributions. We compared our results to numerical simulations. The results are important for applications in climatology, where they can be used to predict the increase in the number of record events due to global warming.