Tsallis' entropy maximization procedure revisited

The proper way of averaging is an important question with regards to Tsalli s' Thermostatistics. Three different procedures have been thus far employed in the pertinent literature. The third one, i.e., the Tsallis-Mendes-Plast ino (TMP) (Physica A 261 (1998) 534) normalization procedure, exhibits clea r advantages with respect to earlier ones. In this work, we advance a disti nct (from the TMP-one) way of handling the Lagrange multipliers involved in the extremization process that leads to Tsallis' statistical operator. It is seen that the new approach considerably simplifies the pertinent analysi s without losing the beautiful properties of the Tsallis-Mendes-Plastino fo rmalism. (C) 2000 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.