2356 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 in temporally random integrable quantum circuits, commutativity simplifies current fluctuations into a competition between current gain and the cost of rare layer compositions, leading to a first-order transition between dominant history classes that reveals temporal randomness as an emergent order parameter in trajectory space.
Using evolutionary reinforcement learning, this study reveals that the mean work required to erase an underdamped memory bit transitions from an isothermal regime (scaling as above the relaxation time) to a distinct adiabatic regime (scaling more slowly than below the relaxation time), demonstrating that learned protocols can outperform those optimized solely for equilibrium boundary conditions.
This paper demonstrates that in active matter driven by persistent noise, nonreciprocal transverse forces act as an effective stabilizing potential that reinforces stable configurations like energy minima, a phenomenon absent in systems governed by thermal noise.
This paper leverages the dimensionless nature and symmetry of the Legendre transformation to derive characteristic functions, partition functions, and thermodynamic formulas for various statistical ensembles, thereby clarifying the fundamental interrelations between the microcanonical ensemble and other ensembles.
This paper establishes a constructive framework for emulations between classical spin models, proving that they preserve key computational properties, are modular and composable, and that a model is universal if and only if it is scalable, closed, and functionally complete, with the 2D Ising model with fields serving as a universal example.
This paper reviews the derivation of multi-particle and single-particle kappa distributions for collisionless plasmas using the superstatistics framework as an alternative to non-extensive statistics, while also demonstrating its utility in calculating expectation values and discussing its implications for correlations, temperature, and entropy.
This paper establishes a rigorous quantum-to-classical mapping for interacting spin systems at finite temperatures, demonstrating that classical Monte Carlo simulations with an effective spin length of accurately predict magnetic transition temperatures and susceptibility in real materials by incorporating leading-order quantum corrections.
This paper analytically derives the scaling of the topological gap exponent as by decomposing a spectral integral into volume and anomalous dimension factors, demonstrating that the mechanism relies on infrared dominance (limiting it to ), while empirical evidence suggests the observed per-configuration correlations are primarily driven by magnetization rather than the specific spectral shape factor.
This paper demonstrates that in low-dimensional quantum reaction-transport systems, singular fluctuation corrections invalidate the standard reaction-limited versus transport-limited classification, leading instead to a universal transient regime where rapid momentum-redistributing collisions drive the system toward a quasi-stationary thermal state.
This paper experimentally demonstrates that following a quench, the interface between immiscible 2D Bose-Einstein condensates enters a long-lived prethermal state characterized by non-equipartition of energy among ripplon modes, where high-momentum modes equilibrate with the bulk while low-momentum modes remain at elevated temperatures due to kinematic isolation.