We find that intervals between successive drops from a leaky faucet display scale-invariant, long-range anticorrelations characterized by the same exponents of heartbeat-to-heartbeat intervals of healthy subjects. From this analysis leaky faucets should be considered as a system in criticality. This behavior is also confirmed by numerical simulations on a lattice and it is independent of faucet width and flow rate. The histogram for the drop intervals is also well described by a Lévy distribution with the same index for both histograms of healthy and diseased subjects. This additional result corroborates the evidence for similarities between leaky faucets and healthy hearts underlying dynamics.

• Received 4 April 1995

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.52.R2168