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 demonstrates that in particle-hole symmetric charged fluids, the charge diffusion constant exhibits a discontinuous dependence on noise strength due to a noncommuting zero-noise and zero-frequency limit, where weak noise can induce singular changes like superdiffusion through a mechanism of hydrodynamic recoupling that invalidates standard zero-noise extrapolations.
This paper proposes a continuum field-theoretic description, the Chern-Simons-Higgs theory, for self-dual Higgs transitions in the toric code and generalizes it to a series of transitions involving various non-Abelian topological orders, with the case conjectured to be infrared-dual to the 3d Ising transition.
This paper utilizes a fermionic formulation and contour-integral approach to derive an exact analytical formula demonstrating that finite-size corrections to the crosscap overlap in the two-dimensional Ising model decay exponentially, with the decay constant determined by the complex singularity structure of the Bogoliubov angle.
This study reveals that translational and rotational inertia in underdamped active dumbbells generate four distinct kinetic temperatures across coexisting phases, causing the dilute gas-like phase to consistently exhibit higher translational and rotational temperatures than the dense liquid-like phase due to the interplay between activity-driven collisions and inertial effects.
This paper constructs a quantum Schwinger-Keldysh effective field theory for diffusive hydrodynamics that enforces fluctuation-dissipation relations via KMS symmetry to reveal intrinsically non-Gaussian noise, ultimately deriving quantum corrections to density-density correlation functions that generalize hydrodynamic long-time tails to all orders in .
This paper presents an analytical method based on a geometric series expansion of collision displacements to accurately predict the mean-square displacement of a tracer particle in a cooling granular gas, demonstrating that this simple approach outperforms the first-Sonine approximation and achieves accuracy comparable to the second-Sonine approximation across a wide range of physical parameters.
This paper demonstrates through numerical analysis that classical one-dimensional systems invariably exhibit anomalous heat conductivity diverging with system size, even in cases where previous studies suggested Fourier's law held, by showing that a hydrodynamic component eventually dominates the energy flux despite potentially occurring at extremely large scales.
This paper demonstrates that pump-probe experiments can uniquely identify 2D topological excitations in 3D layered spin liquids by revealing distinct subdiffusive spreading and anomalous decay laws, such as logarithmic propagation and a density decay, which arise from the topological constraint that only pairs of fractionalized excitations can hop between layers.
This study demonstrates through large-scale Monte Carlo simulations that a bilayer Ising model with moiré-modulated interlayer coupling undergoes a conventional 2D Ising phase transition while exhibiting a low-temperature crossover from uniform ferromagnetism to domain-textured states driven by geometric energy balance, without breaking layer symmetry.
This paper demonstrates that timelike entanglement measures derived from the spacetime density kernel in the Rosenzweig-Porter model, including Tsallis entropy, imagitivity, and a newly defined kernel negativity, serve as sharp diagnostics for distinguishing between ergodic, fractal, and localized phases by exhibiting distinct growth patterns, spectral form factor-like structures, and correlations with fractal dimensions.