Preferential growth: exact solution of the time-dependent distributions.

We consider a preferential growth model where particles are added one by one to the system consisting of clusters of particles. A new particle can either form a new cluster (with probability q) or join an already existing cluster with a probability proportional to the size thereof. We calculate exactly the probability Pi(k,t) that the size of the ith cluster at time t is k. We analyze the asymptotics, the scaling properties of the size distribution and of the mean size, as well as the relation of our system to recent network models.