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 investigates a sixth-order convective-viscous Cahn-Hilliard equation derived from a modified thermodynamic potential, deriving exact static and traveling wave solutions and analyzing their dependence on system parameters.
This study presents an algorithm for the automatic structural search of tensor network states, including entanglement renormalization, which optimizes local structures based on variational energy to improve accuracy in representing non-uniform entangled states, particularly when initialized with existing design methods like the strong disordered renormalization group.
This paper extends the Landauer-Büttiker formula to open quantum systems with gain or loss using the Lindblad-Keldysh formalism, revealing novel transport phenomena such as current generation from symmetry breaking or disorder, and the restoration of the Wiedemann-Franz law beyond the energy band.
This paper elucidates the detailed structure of heat dissipation in linear time-delayed Langevin systems by decomposing it into a frequency spectrum via the Harada-Sasa equality, revealing characteristic oscillatory behaviors that reflect the system's nonequilibrium nature and offering a viable experimental approach for analyzing dissipation through the violation of the fluctuation-response relation.
Using a 78-qubit superconducting processor, researchers experimentally demonstrated long-lived prethermal phases in many-body systems driven by structured random multipolar protocols, revealing a doubly tunable heating suppression mechanism and observing non-equilibrium dynamics that exceed the capabilities of classical tensor-network simulations.
This paper establishes a unifying framework for nonlinear voter models by demonstrating that while symmetric absorbing states lead to Generalized Voter transitions, the introduction of noise eliminates these states to create a phase diagram featuring continuous Ising transitions, discontinuous Modified Generalized Voter transitions, and a tricritical point, all of which exhibit universal scaling behavior.
This paper investigates the time evolution of nonlinear fields in chaotic D-shaped billiards, revealing that strong nonlinearity drives dynamical thermalization into a Rayleigh-Jeans condensate, while also characterizing phenomena such as wave collapse, vortex dynamics, and superfluidity in both focusing and defocusing regimes relevant to optical fibers and fluid light.
This paper investigates heat dissipation in marginally stable linear time-delayed Langevin systems, revealing that despite both diffusive and oscillatory criticality exhibiting linearly growing variance, they display fundamentally distinct thermodynamic signatures where the average heat dissipation rate approaches a constant for the former but diverges linearly with oscillations for the latter.
This paper demonstrates that while the traditional Kibble-Zurek mechanism breaks down for topological defect formation in crossover transitions with approximate symmetries due to exponential corrections, a generalized framework incorporating explicit symmetry breaking into the dynamical correlation length successfully predicts defect density across all quench rates.
This study investigates the dynamics of a phoretically interacting active colloidal interface with roto-translational coupling, revealing a unique non-equilibrium universality class characterized by a "C-shaped" topology and distinct scaling exponents for both height and orientational fluctuations.