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 demonstrates that the real and imaginary parts of pseudo entropy for pairs of nonorthogonal states can be systematically derived from ordinary entanglement entropy using analytic continuation, Taylor series expansions, and Kramers-Kronig relations, with specific applications to conformal field theories and Gaussian states.
This paper investigates the unusual coarsening dynamics in a one-dimensional driven Light-Heavy-Vacancy lattice model, revealing that unlike conventional systems where domains merge, early domains disintegrate to form new structures, leading to non-monotonic landscape growth and oscillating height fluctuations driven by three traveling normal modes.
This paper demonstrates that in an extended Aubry-André model, the bias parameter, alongside correlation, critically governs localization behavior by revealing that increasing potential strength reduces bias to favor localization, while zero bias leads to complete localization even at weak strengths.
This paper demonstrates that the unique property of Borromean supercounterfluids, where distinct elementary vortices exist despite only Goldstone modes, manifests clearly at the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition under conditions of slight to moderate intercomponent symmetry breaking or specific intercomponent drag fine-tuning.
This paper establishes a microscopic derivation of black hole spectral chaos by demonstrating that quantum fluctuations of a fuzzy-sphere horizon geometry lift parton degeneracies to generate structured random-matrix ensembles, thereby providing a fundamental geometric basis for Wigner–Dyson universality and the Stanford–Witten relation.
This paper employs higher-order cluster analysis on force networks from dense suspension simulations to reveal significant changes in an effective interaction potential near the discontinuous shear thickening transition, thereby challenging mean-field descriptions and supporting the development of an emergent field theory for this phenomenon.
This paper demonstrates that Jaynes' principle of maximum entropy, applied to the logarithmic moments of single-particle kinetic energies, provides a reliable method for reconstructing and discriminating between different superstatistical inverse temperature distributions that are otherwise indistinguishable by standard kinetic energy statistics.
This paper characterizes the nonstabilizerness of random fermionic Gaussian states by deriving exact expressions for their Pauli spectrum and stabilizer purities, revealing a "frozen" regime of magic density at Rényi index and demonstrating that typical states retain certified magic even after discarding a significant fraction of their modes.
This review synthesizes concepts from control theory, optimal transport, probabilistic inference, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, and machine learning to highlight their shared foundation in optimizing free-energy-like functionals, while illustrating these connections through applications in reinforcement learning, variational inference, and generative modeling.
This paper classifies and characterizes the topological defects in spin-isotropic spiral spin liquids, revealing a rich family of fractional half-vortices with Ising anyon-like fusion rules that bind and fuse to vacuum below an order-by-disorder phase transition.