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 every fusion category containing a non-invertible, self-dual object generates a Temperley-Lieb integrable anyonic chain, establishing a connection to Pasquier's ADE lattice models and arguing that these systems are gapped when the object's quantum dimension exceeds 2, while noting that large finite-size effects can complicate numerical analysis for dimensions close to 2.
This paper demonstrates that while the potential of mean force (PMF) generally renders the generalized Langevin equation inoperable by introducing unknown position-dependent dissipation and noise, this issue is resolved for systems with linear forces, such as a particle coupled to a Klein-Gordon bath, where the PMF simply replaces the external potential in a standard equation.
This paper presents a unified field-theoretic free-energy framework that successfully describes the morphological transitions and phase diagram of semiflexible polymers in poor solvents by integrating monomer attraction, orientational ordering, and bending rigidity to predict the existence of globule, toroid, and rodlike structures, including a potential triple point.
This paper investigates how embedding geometry influences the entropy of soft random geometric graphs, demonstrating that while small connection ranges render entropy dependent only on dimension, large ranges make boundary shapes significant, leading to a novel formulation that estimates entropy via average degree to handle complex geometries lacking closed-form solutions.
This paper proposes a measure of information flow between classically interacting particles, defined as the ratio of average power flux to initial energy (P/2E), which establishes a lower bound on channel capacity and quantifies early-time information exchange with a thermal bath.
This paper investigates the dynamics of impurity particles in a zero-temperature gas of hard spheres following a localized energy release, using hydrodynamics and kinetic theory to derive scaling laws for impurity displacement, collision frequency, and speed that are validated by molecular dynamics simulations.
This paper establishes that in the large limit of semi-holographic gauge theories, the unique global thermal equilibrium state—characterized by a single physical temperature and maximum entropy—is the inevitable relaxation outcome for typical non-equilibrium states with sufficiently high energy density, despite the system's capacity to sustain a pseudo-equilibrium with distinct temperatures between its perturbative and non-perturbative subsectors.
This paper establishes a fundamental connection between elastic and active turbulence by demonstrating that their continuum descriptions are analogous, revealing that polymeric fluids behave as deformable analogues of contractile active matter where the transition to chaotic flow is driven by the emergence of topological defects and activity-like gradients.
Molecular dynamics simulations reveal that introducing Vicsek-type alignment activity in a confined near-critical Lennard-Jones fluid overcomes the kinetic arrest of passive phase separation by enabling collective domain transport, thereby accelerating coarsening from diffusive to ballistic growth and facilitating complete phase separation.
This paper addresses the challenge of modeling stiff forces in soft matter systems by providing a practical summary of constrained Brownian dynamics equations with "soft" constraints and a novel singular perturbation theory derivation that validates these equations over relevant timescales, while also extending the framework to scenarios with spatially varying mobility.