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 a statistical method based on the statistical Jacobi approximation to derive a flow equation for resonance density, successfully explaining the finite-size drifts toward delocalization in many-body localization models by characterizing how resonance proliferation drives the transition to thermalization.
This paper demonstrates that chiral order in two-dimensional nonreciprocal flocking mixtures is generically unstable and collapses into spatiotemporal defect chaos due to the proliferation of topological defects driven by density-order coupling, resulting in scale-free fluctuations with nonuniversal exponents below a finite correlation length that diverges as nonreciprocity vanishes.
This paper introduces a renormalization-group inspired, lattice-based framework for piecewise generalized linear models that offers explicit interpretability and structured parameter sharing, while utilizing replica analysis to derive principled guidelines for lattice design and regularization scaling to maintain generalization performance.
This paper demonstrates that complete knowledge of non-Markovian island-state dynamics in Majorana transport systems is thermodynamically incomplete, as it fails to uniquely determine lead-specific transport statistics like charge and heat noise due to a fundamental loss of information regarding the specific reservoir channels involved in electron exchange.
This paper demonstrates that irreversible reactions in chemical reaction networks and Markov chains generate emergent conservation laws and broken cycles, resolving a recent conundrum regarding non-integer conservation laws by deriving a new law that links conserved quantities, broken cycles, and a "co-production index" to correct existing undercounting methods.
This paper proposes a method to derive genuine large-deviation rate functions for open quantum systems with strong symmetries by applying the Gärtner-Ellis theorem within operator space blocks and minimizing the resulting local rate functions, a scheme justified by dissipative freezing and demonstrated through analytical and three-spin models where nonanalyticities manifest as avoided level crossings.
This paper demonstrates that higher-order ecological interactions can be indistinguishable from pairwise dynamics in time-series data due to mechanistic identifiability issues, necessitating the integration of additional ecological information to reliably infer interaction structures.
This paper demonstrates that when a dissipative controller with non-equilibrium fluctuations drives a passive system, the optimal control protocol shifts from the traditional infinite-time quasistatic limit to a finite-duration strategy, a transition that can be eliminated by imposing endpoint constraints.
This paper introduces a theoretical framework inspired by Rayleigh's analysis of thermoacoustic instabilities to derive criteria for the onset of mechanical activity and rotational motion in a Newtonian probe coupled to driven chemical processes, based on the phase relationship between entropic and frenetic contributions.
This paper establishes and experimentally verifies the "Kubo-Thermalization correspondence," an exact theoretical link connecting long-time quantum thermalization dynamics to short-time linear-response spectra in strongly interacting systems, thereby enabling the inference of thermalization behavior from equilibrium measurements.