2392 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.
Using the AdS/CFT correspondence to study a holographic superfluid disk, this paper demonstrates that while vortex density follows Kibble-Zurek scaling for slow quenches, it exhibits distinct universal scaling with final temperature for fast quenches, with vortex statistics consistently described by a Poisson binomial distribution across both regimes.
This paper proposes that the bacterial flagellar motor achieves ultrasensitive, non-equilibrium switching through "Global Mechanical Coupling," a mechanism where local mechanical torques from stators drive cooperative conformational changes without requiring direct subunit interactions, thereby enabling faster and more sensitive responses than equilibrium models allow.
This paper numerically demonstrates that while the dissipated work in pulling a polymer chain without internal friction consistently increases with chain length, the presence of internal friction introduces a stiffness-dependent relationship where dissipation either increases or decreases with chain length depending on the pulling trap stiffness, thereby invalidating the simple damping-dissipation correlation observed in single-mode systems.
This paper investigates fully connected active rotator networks with Kuramoto coupling and mixed-sign Gaussian feedback disorder, revealing how the competition between local pinning and collective alignment shapes drift regimes and can be mapped through numerical simulations and analytical limits.
This paper presents an analytical theory for active particles in power-law viscoelastic media by solving coupled non-Markovian generalized Langevin equations, revealing how memory kernels and activity jointly govern anomalous transport regimes and novel dynamical phenomena like fractional short-time motion and enhanced long-time persistence.
This study introduces a Langevin model combining Vicsek-like consensus with XY-like orientational dynamics to demonstrate that finite-time orientational relaxation acts as a critical control parameter, driving a sequence of distinct nonequilibrium phases—including polar bands, a cross-sea state, and micro-clustering—and fundamentally restructuring collective motion in polar active matter.
This paper reinterprets the Hawking--Page transition through a thermodynamic vector field framework to derive universal ratios and barriers across various black hole geometries, while proposing a novel formulation involving categorical or non-invertible symmetry defects.
This paper presents an exact mapping of the spin-1/2 Ising-Heisenberg model on an extended Lieb lattice to an effective Ising model, revealing a complex ground-state phase diagram with quantum and classical phases and characterizing both continuous and discontinuous thermal transitions that are validated by Monte Carlo simulations.
This paper introduces a new thermodynamic framework for extending Chapman-Enskog theory to dense fluids by utilizing an exchange function linked to thermodynamic properties, proposing an alternative to Modified Enskog Theory that incorporates potential interaction energy and demonstrates high accuracy in predicting shear viscosity for Lennard-Jones and Weeks-Chandler-Anderson fluids across a wide range of densities and temperatures.
This paper constructs a new three-spectral-parameter Yang-Baxter equation for the chiral Potts model by extending the unification of solvable edge and vertex models, thereby generalizing Onsager's star-triangle relation to account for the higher-genus curve structure and the specific interaction terms of symmetric systems.