LONG-RANGE ANTICORRELATIONS AND NON-GAUSSIAN BEHAVIOR OF A LEAKY FAUCET

We find that intervals between successive drops from a leaky faucet di splay scale-invariant, long-range anticorrelations characterized by th e same exponents of heartbeat-to-heartbeat intervals of healthy subjec ts. From this analysis leaky faucets should be considered as a system in criticality. This behavior is also confirmed by numerical simulatio ns on a lattice and it is independent of faucet width and flow rate, T he histogram for the drop intervals is also well described by a Levy d istribution with the same index for both histograms of healthy and dis eased subjects. This additional result corroborates the evidence for s imilarities between leaky faucets and healthy hearts underlying dynami cs.