1592 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 establishes a rigorous quantum formalism linking the partition function of the classical $XY$ model to a noisy toric-rotor code, demonstrating that a Kosterlitz--Thouless phase transition in spin stiffness corresponds to a resilience phase transition where the code's logical subspace maintains partial noise resilience below a critical noise width of approximately 0.89.
This paper demonstrates that internal activity fundamentally restructures thin-film dewetting by decoupling vertical accumulation and lateral rupture into independently regulated dynamical length scales, thereby replacing universal diffusion-limited growth with persistence-driven motion that accelerates coarsening exponents and rupture propagation.
This paper introduces an adaptive active particle model that integrates minimal information processing with intermittent motion to derive a universal bound on navigation speed, revealing that while memory degradation slows movement, the fundamental speed-accuracy trade-off remains primarily governed by external orientational noise.
This paper utilizes ballistic macroscopic fluctuation theory to derive the exact non-Gaussian probability distribution of spin-current fluctuations in the quantum XXZ spin-1/2 chain, revealing their universal hydrodynamic origin and analytically linking them to the spin diffusion constant and static susceptibility.
This paper demonstrates that sufficiently persistent active fluctuations in living tissues can destabilize an otherwise stable flat surface, inducing stochastic buckling with a selected wavelength through a mechanism accurately captured by a non-Markovian theory.
This paper establishes a framework for defining mixed-state quantum phases via local quantum channel connectivity by linking renormalization group schemes to quantum error correction, demonstrating that the finite-temperature toric code is trivial while the dephased toric code remains in a non-trivial phase precisely when its logical information remains decodable.
By extending the particle exchange parameter to the complex plane and analyzing the distribution of Lee-Yang zeros at 0 K, this study reveals that specific zero locations disrupt the analytic continuation required to solve the fermion sign problem and induce a phase-transition-like behavior in fermionic free energy.
This paper analyzes the statistical properties of continuous-time random walks on a one-dimensional lattice with Gaussian random potentials across three distinct models, demonstrating that while quantities like probability current and resistance are non-self-averaging, the splitting probability, mean first-passage time, and diffusion coefficient become self-averaging in the thermodynamic limit despite exhibiting strong finite-size fluctuations.
This paper demonstrates that the mesoscopic theory, which accounts for charge density fluctuations, and the associative mean spherical approximation, which relies on chemical equilibrium, yield fairly good agreement for the electrical double layer capacitance and free ion charge density of the restricted primitive model at high densities and low temperatures.
This paper investigates the limits of reversibility in nearly integrable systems with mixed phase spaces and demonstrates how approximate counterdiabatic driving can mitigate dissipative losses, suggesting that these findings extend to quantum many-body systems with large degeneracy and integrability-breaking perturbations.