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 reviews Amir O. Caldeira's four-decade-long contributions to quantum Brownian motion, highlighting his foundational work on dissipation and tunneling, his development of models beyond the Caldeira-Leggett framework, and his lasting influence on quantum decoherence and thermodynamics.
This paper derives approximate analytic expressions for the mean-force Gibbs state of two qubits strongly coupled to a common thermal reservoir, revealing that equilibrium entanglement is a non-monotonic function of coupling strength and can be enhanced by broadening the reservoir's spectral density, thereby establishing strong system-reservoir coupling as a viable resource for generating entanglement.
This Perspective reviews the evolution of stochastic thermodynamics over the past three decades, highlighting its recent extensions to complex systems with memory and hidden degrees of freedom, the challenges in applying these concepts to macroscopic phenomena, and its emerging applications in non-physical domains such as computation, biology, and social dynamics.
This paper employs Liu's method of multipliers to derive thermodynamically consistent constitutive models for Korteweg fluids, successfully incorporating temperature-dependent capillary effects and cross-coupling between mechanical and thermal phenomena while establishing a generalized Gibbs relation.
This paper presents a unified replica-based framework to analytically characterize the largest eigenvalue and the geometric structure of the top eigenvector for large Euclidean random matrices with quadratic kernels, deriving explicit expressions confirmed by numerical simulations.
This contribution employs a generalized DAOE (Dissipation-Assisted Operator Evolution) algorithm to numerically demonstrate the transition from ballistic to diffusive transport in interacting lattice models, showing that the diffusion constant scales inversely with charge density at low charge densities, and provides a minimal theoretical model that accurately captures these hydrodynamic correlations.
This paper proposes a real-time effective field theory approach to calculate work statistics for extracting work from a thermal bath coupled to a qubit, demonstrating that spin or topological qubits outperform fermionic or spinless alternatives in heat engine and refrigerator efficiency due to their underlying quantum statistics.
This paper extends the definition of fractional Brownian motion and the fractional Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process to the negative Hurst exponent regime () via local temporal averaging, revealing that the resulting smoothed processes are stationary, exhibit suppressed diffusion, and possess asymptotic insensitivity to confining potentials.
This article generalizes previous findings on resonating valence bond ground states by analytically solving the simplest hole-doped Hubbard model on a quasi-one-dimensional tetrahedral chain and demonstrating the existence of exponentially degenerate partial RVB or dimer-monomer ground states in which each tetrahedron hosts a spin-1/2 monomer and a spin-0 dimer.
This paper demonstrates that measurement-induced entanglement in Tomonaga-Luttinger liquids is a universal, conformally invariant phenomenon determined by the CFT's operator content, which can be exactly computed via a replica trick and fundamentally differs from entanglement induced by forcing specific measurement outcomes.