1593 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 stochastic resetting can control spatiotemporal chaos in dynamical systems by inducing a phase transition at a critical rate where both the Lyapunov exponent and butterfly velocity vanish, effectively halting the spread of information.
This paper introduces the Ising-Conway Entropy Game (ICEg), a self-driven thermal zero-player system that combines features of lattice gases and Ising models to demonstrate a universal, temperature- and size-independent bound on entropy production, offering a novel framework for studying stochastic thermodynamics in driven nonequilibrium many-body systems.
This paper proposes a method to improve quantum annealing efficiency for problems with small energy gaps by introducing controlled diagonal catalysts that exploit diabatic transitions, achieving an approximate quadratic speedup in the exponential scaling exponent of the time to solution.
This paper demonstrates that a constrained kagome Ising antiferromagnet with infinite first and third neighbor couplings exhibits a topological devil's staircase characterized by an infinite series of thermal first-order transitions where quantized linear defects condense, creating a partially ordered low-temperature phase with a finite density of zero-energy domain walls and non-commensurate wave-vectors.
This paper derives a self-consistent hydrodynamic theory for coupled binary-fluid-surfactant systems by modeling surfactants as Brownian dumbbells and applying Rayleigh's variational principle to obtain continuum equations that accurately capture phenomena like surface tension reduction and droplet stabilization.
This paper proposes and validates two distinct methods—one analytical based on pole analysis of transformed distributions and one simulation-based using wave function cloning—for computing the large deviations of first-passage-time statistics in general open quantum systems.
This paper demonstrates that supplementing chaotic many-body dynamics with stochastic resetting induces a sharp dynamical phase transition where the Lyapunov spectrum collapses to zero, causing information to shift from ballistic scrambling to exponential localization with critical exponents and .
This position paper proposes a physics-based phenomenological framework to characterize and address cross-modal bias in multimodal large language models, arguing that analyzing transformer dynamics through physical surrogates reveals systematic distortions and error-attractor patterns that conventional embedding-level analyses miss.
The paper proves that for any local Hamiltonian on a spin chain at finite temperature, there exists a finite entanglement length such that removing an interval of that size renders the remaining left and right half-chains separable.
Through extensive numerical simulations and a Laplacian framework, this study reveals that infinitely persistent active particles in a jammed state exhibit a critical yielding force scaling with virial pressure, distinct force distribution statistics, and abrupt plasticity that challenges continuous spectral softening while retaining the Hessian's predictive power for relaxation times.