2356 papers
Statistical mechanics explores how the chaotic motion of countless tiny particles gives rise to the predictable laws governing heat, pressure, and phase transitions. This field bridges the gap between the microscopic world of atoms and the macroscopic reality we experience daily, offering deep insights into why materials behave the way they do.
On Gist.Science, we process every new preprint in this category as it appears on arXiv to make these complex findings accessible to everyone. For each paper, we provide both a plain-language explanation for the curious reader and a detailed technical summary for specialists, ensuring that groundbreaking research is never lost behind a wall of jargon.
Below are the latest papers in statistical mechanics, freshly curated and summarized to help you understand the cutting edge of this fascinating discipline.
This paper proposes and experimentally validates a two-stage local control protocol that enhances counterdiabatic driving for efficient ground-state preparation in many-body systems, demonstrating its scalability up to 14 qubits on a trapped-ion platform without requiring spectral gap knowledge or non-local operations.
This paper establishes the exact non-thermal asymptotic dynamics of a time-dependent higher-spin Richardson-Gaudin model, demonstrating that its behavior fundamentally differs from the spin-1/2 case by requiring independent treatment for each spin size and defying standard Generalized Gibbs Ensemble descriptions, while confirming the exactness of mean-field theory for local observables.
This paper presents an analytically tractable many-body theory for false vacuum decay in ferromagnetic quantum spin-1/2 chains, which accurately describes the nucleation and coherent dynamics of true-vacuum bubbles across various parameter regimes and offers new microscopic insights into metastable states by drawing parallels with cosmological decay.
This paper generalizes previous work to derive thermodynamically optimal protocols and speed limits for extracting maximum work from effective two-level systems with underlying quantum dynamics across all driving speeds, explicitly accounting for the impact of coarse-graining and fluctuations on finite-time thermodynamics.
Using analytic bootstrap methods, this paper characterizes reflecting boundaries in critical loop models with a single complex parameter, derives their disc 1-point functions, and provides an explicit formula for disc 2-point functions as infinite combinations of conformal blocks.
This paper demonstrates that spontaneous parity breaking in weak longitudinal fields serves as a systematic principle for predicting and rationalizing nontrivial phases, such as parity-broken and supersolid states, in frustrated quantum antiferromagnets on triangular lattices, a conclusion validated through large-scale tensor network calculations.
This paper employs thermal tensor networks to study (2+1)-dimensional lattice gauge theories, successfully extracting universal conformal field theory data that confirms the Svetitsky-Yaffe conjecture for , reveals an intermediate phase with emergent U(1) symmetry in the case, and determines zero-temperature deconfinement transition points for .
This paper applies the hyperstatistics framework to model quantum decay in complex, disordered environments, demonstrating that a distribution of local decay rates leads to non-Markovian power-law survival probabilities and distinct regimes of finite or divergent mean lifetimes and fluctuations depending on the entropic index .
This paper establishes the theoretical existence and uniqueness of the nearest stealthy hyperuniform configuration for almost every random particle arrangement in a two-dimensional periodic domain, while validating this geometric framework through a gradient-based generator network that successfully transforms generic random states into disordered hyperuniform configurations by suppressing long-wavelength density fluctuations.
Using large-scale molecular dynamics simulations, this study reveals that binary mixtures of ellipsoidal particles exhibit a distinct two-stage ordering process following a temperature quench, where rapid orientational nematic coarsening precedes slower compositional phase separation, demonstrating a clear separation between these dynamics governed by different conservation laws.