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.
This paper introduces measurement-based quantum diffusion models that utilize randomized weak measurements to bridge classical and quantum diffusion theories, establishing mathematical equivalences between quantum score matching and unitary generators while proposing Petz recovery maps and classical shadow reconstruction for rigorous quantum state generation.
This paper introduces a generalized -algebra rooted in a unified nonadditive entropic functional , which extends existing statistical mechanics frameworks to handle complex systems with diverse microscopic state growth laws by combining -deformations and power-law logarithmic modifications.
This paper introduces a novel construction of two-dimensional fractional Brownian motion with dependent components using a matrix-valued Hurst operator to accommodate full parameter ranges and anisotropic scaling, while providing a comprehensive theoretical analysis of its covariance structures and power spectral density in both time and frequency domains.
By mapping Laughlin wave-functions in ideal Chern bands to classical Coulomb gases, this study rigorously demonstrates that increasing magnetic field inhomogeneity drives a phase transition from a gapped topological state to a gapless, power-law correlated dielectric state with continuously tunable correlation exponents, even at fixed filling fractions.
This paper investigates the efficiency and limitations of quasi-adiabatic thermal ensemble preparation in the thermodynamic limit, demonstrating that while nonintegrable systems can be accurately prepared using a single parameter despite exponentially scaling time, integrable systems generally require an extensive number of parameters tied to conserved quantities and are further hindered by quantum phase transitions.
Using replica Keldysh field theory and numerical simulations, this paper demonstrates that continuously monitored one-dimensional free fermions do not exhibit genuine measurement- or unraveling-induced entanglement phase transitions, as their steady-state entanglement ultimately obeys an area law beyond exponentially large length scales despite displaying critical-like behavior at intermediate scales.
This paper demonstrates that thermal fluctuations coupled with finite extensibility fundamentally alter the Euler buckling instability of semiflexible polymers, leading to a new critical regime where the critical compressional strain increases with system size and is governed by a distinct fixed point with unique critical exponents.
This paper presents an analytic nonlinear theory of shear banding in athermally sheared amorphous solids, deriving equations that account for plastic-induced dipole screening to explain the instability mechanism, predict shear band width, and determine the critical stress threshold for failure.
This paper analytically derives the attenuation constant for Drude and Drude-Sommerfeld metals with high carrier concentrations, revealing critical behavior in optical properties like group velocity and dielectric constant near the plasma frequency and providing associated critical exponents and quantum corrections.
This paper proposes a free-energy framework to distinguish between capability elicitation, which reweights existing behaviors within a model's accessible support, and capability creation, which expands that support through mechanisms like search or tool use, arguing that this distinction is more critical than the traditional SFT versus RL dichotomy in post-training.