2392 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 introduces a unified geometric framework that characterizes both the mean and fluctuations of dissipated availability in finite-time microscopic heat engines using metric tensors derived from equilibrium correlations, thereby establishing geometric bounds on efficiency and its variance across various stochastic systems.
This paper demonstrates that, unlike classical systems where time reversibility is broken by exponentially small errors, the quantum chaos diffusion of cold atoms or ions in a harmonic trap and pulsed optical lattice can be inverted with up to 100% efficiency, offering a quantum perspective on the historic Boltzmann-Loschmidt dispute regarding irreversibility.
This paper demonstrates that even when exact dynamical constraints are perturbed by a boundary thermal bath, Hilbert space fragmentation can induce exponentially slow thermalization in both Hamiltonian and random unitary circuit models due to strong bottlenecks that severely restrict the system's exploration of configuration space.
This paper employs mean-field theory, Mayer's f-functions, and Hill's nanothermodynamics to model phase transitions in MOF-confined fluids, revealing that pore size dictates whether the transition is discontinuous or continuous while demonstrating that confinement lowers the free-energy barrier and condensation pressure compared to bulk fluids.
This paper demonstrates that the emergent critical behavior and algebraic density decay observed in weakly dissipative lattice Fermi gases also occur in continuum space, where the study of various reaction-diffusion processes reveals temperature-independent asymptotic exponents and a mean-field directed percolation phase transition.
This paper reveals a fundamental tension in quantum Brownian motion where completely positive and trace-preserving (CPTP) extensions, while ensuring quantum consistency, violate detailed balance and generate anomalous entropy production at steady state, unlike the thermodynamically sound but non-completely positive Caldeira-Leggett master equation.
This paper generalizes the decoupling of internal fluctuating variables from cell size in size-structured populations by deriving conditions for lineage and ensemble decoupling, connecting these results to the Feynman-Kac formula to transform size dynamics into growth-homogeneous processes via random time changes and exponential tilting.
This paper proposes extending quantum mechanics to an enlarged Hilbert space that restores a fundamental symmetry between space-time and momentum-energy sectors, a dual-manifold structure that independently reproduces key cosmological phenomena such as dark energy and Hawking radiation.
This paper demonstrates that the tensor renormalization group (TRG) method, when applied to symmetry-twisted partition functions, provides an efficient framework for detecting spontaneous symmetry breaking and accurately determining critical temperatures and exponents in the 2D Ising, 3D , and 2D (BKT) models.
This paper clarifies common misconceptions in Bose-Einstein condensation theory by asserting that global gauge symmetry breaking is essential for condensation, refuting the existence of grand canonical catastrophes and thermodynamically anomalous fluctuations, and correcting misunderstandings regarding the Popov approximation and statistical ensemble equivalence.