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 generalizes the concept of complex landscapes to far-from-equilibrium systems by demonstrating how a stochastic spin model with non-reciprocal and heterogeneous interactions exhibits hidden spontaneous oscillations that can be unveiled through entropy production density and characterized via a configurational entropy counting nonequilibrium collective states.
This paper demonstrates through numerical simulations and analytical derivation that collective oscillations in a three-dimensional spin model with non-reciprocal interactions arise from two successive phase transitions: the emergence of local noisy oscillators followed by their synchronization into coherent macroscopic oscillations.
This paper demonstrates that while separable quenched disorder masks the oscillating phase transition in a non-reciprocal mean-field spin model when observing standard magnetisation, the transition can be successfully detected through specific disorder-dependent observables, third-order susceptibilities, and the overlap distribution.
This paper proposes and validates a physical framework that models ant chemotactic navigation as an effective magnetic interaction, successfully explaining the observed oscillatory motion along pheromone trails through analytical predictions and experimental data.
This paper establishes entanglement dynamics and out-of-time-order correlators as reliable diagnostics for distinguishing between transient and steady-state chaos in dissipative quantum systems, correcting previous misconceptions about the link between Ginibre spectral statistics and long-term chaotic behavior.
This paper demonstrates that while strong higher-order interactions typically hinder synchronization in Kuramoto models on random hypergraphs, weak higher-order interactions can actually enhance collective synchronization when combined with pairwise ones, suggesting that a mixed allocation of interaction types optimizes synchronization under constrained budgets.
This paper introduces a model of active dumbbell-shaped particles with quadrupolar interactions that, through the competition between active motion and orthogonal alignment, spontaneously forms stable, spinning triangular and quadrilateral aggregates known as "windmilling clusters."
This paper introduces the multilayer triadic percolation (MTP) model, which generalizes triadic interactions to multilayer networks and reveals a significantly richer dynamical landscape—including Neimark-Sacker bifurcations, pseudo-periodic oscillations, and period-two cycles—compared to the chaotic behavior observed in single-layer systems.
This paper investigates a Kolmogorov equation for phase-space probability distributions that describes both isolated and open systems, successfully predicting entropy increase, recovering the Gibbs microcanonical and canonical distributions in equilibrium, and deriving the Boltzmann equation for kinetic theory.
This paper introduces a general framework for Holstein-Primakoff spin codes that maps continuous-variable bosonic codes onto permutation-symmetric spin ensembles, demonstrating their robustness against both collective and local noise while proposing a measurement-free recovery procedure to convert local errors into correctable collective-spin errors.