1581 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 a low-computational-cost optimal control framework for two-dimensional diffusion processes that utilizes spectral decomposition of the Fokker-Planck equation to achieve a desired nonequilibrium steady-state circulation while accelerating convergence to the stationary distribution.
This paper presents an exact solution to the Bethe ansatz integrable Russian Doll superconductivity model, revealing a cyclic renormalization group structure where the quantum number Q acts as an order parameter to characterize localized, delocalized, and fractal phases, thereby establishing a new mechanism for fractality in deterministic systems.
By deriving an exact mapping of a one-dimensional lattice gauge theory to decoupled XXZ and transverse-field Ising chains, the authors combine analytical and numerical methods to reveal a full phase diagram featuring emergent superconformal symmetry along a multi-critical line where fermionic and bosonic velocities coincide.
The paper demonstrates that a sufficiently strong boundary interaction defect in a semi-infinite Heisenberg spin-1/2 chain or equivalent SU(2)-symmetric quantum circuit supports a conserved, quasi-localized edge mode that sustains non-decaying boundary correlations and a nonzero Drude weight, while a critical interaction strength marks a transition to ergodic boundary dynamics.
The paper introduces CaRBM, a fixed-depth quantum algorithm that utilizes Restricted Boltzmann Machine block-encoding with partial correction to efficiently prepare thermal states, particularly at high temperatures, as demonstrated by its application to calculating partition function zeros and phase diagrams in the XXZ and Gross-Neveu models.
This paper proposes a unified framework for extended chiral and bulk conformal field theories and their corresponding topological orders by explicitly constructing a "bulk semion" subalgebra that elucidates the correspondence between fusion rules, generalized symmetries, and topological holography, thereby offering a method to derive topological order data directly from bulk CFTs.
This paper presents a model of crowd-avoiding agents competing for spatial resources, revealing how population density and individual traits like neighborhood perception and information access drive emergent inefficiency and inequality through spatial self-organization.
This paper investigates the interpretation of the power-law banded random matrix ensemble as one-dimensional quantum many-body Hamiltonians by comparing labeling schemes and demonstrating how its single-particle phases correspond to distinct entanglement transitions, including the identification of an intermediate phase with volume-law scaling that deviates from the Page value.
This paper introduces a quantum protocol combining reverse quantum annealing with optimized nonequilibrium initial distributions to efficiently estimate Ising partition functions at low temperatures, significantly reducing computational scaling exponents and overcoming the statistical fluctuations that limit classical methods while remaining feasible for near-term quantum devices.
This paper introduces a simple and efficient algorithm for preparing quantum thermal states on near-term processors by combining engineered bath resetting with modulated system-bath coupling, which achieves a fixed point approximating the Gibbs state with second-order accuracy in coupling strength and has been validated numerically for both the 2D Quantum Ising model and free-fermion systems.