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.
Using a 24-qubit superconducting processor, this study experimentally demonstrates Hilbert-space fragmentation in Stark systems by observing initial-state dependent non-equilibrium dynamics that persist and intensify with system size, providing strong evidence for a weak breakdown of ergodicity distinct from disordered systems.
This paper introduces a new universality class for RNA-like polymers with periodic base sequences and artificial directionality, characterized by a field theory that describes a continuous crossover between standard critical points and a novel critical point unstable against natural antiparallel pairing.
This paper introduces a general hierarchy of semidefinite programming optimization problems that provides rigorous, increasingly tight lower bounds on the spectral gaps of frustration-free quantum Hamiltonians in the thermodynamic limit, significantly outperforming existing finite-size methods like Knabe's bound in both accuracy and parameter range.
This paper presents a non-phenomenological influence functional framework to model simultaneous fermionic and bosonic dissipation, revealing how electronic friction and solvent effects distinctly influence quantum vibrational relaxation and charge transfer dynamics in electrochemical systems.
Using time-domain terahertz emission spectroscopy, researchers observed a dynamic magneto-chiral instability in photoexcited tellurium, where an electric current parallel to a magnetic field amplifies electromagnetic waves, offering a promising mechanism for THz-wave amplification in chiral materials.
This paper establishes the mathematical foundations for deriving first-order constitutive equations of a relativistic charged gas by applying a generalized projection method within the Chapman-Enskog expansion, arguing that the trace-fixed particle frame yields a causal, stable, and strongly hyperbolic fluid theory with frame-independent transport coefficients.
This paper demonstrates that structured quantum noise, specifically engineered ancilla errors on IBM superconducting processors, can paradoxically stabilize discrete time crystals in a kicked Ising model by acting as spatiotemporal disorder that prevents thermalization, thereby enabling robust subharmonic oscillations that are absent in noiseless simulations.
This paper formalizes a classification of three distinct types of local parent Hamiltonians that share a given quantum state as an exact eigenstate, rigorously deriving the complete set of such Hamiltonians for the state to reveal its role as a Quantum Many-Body Scar and establishing general constraints for product and short-range-entangled states.
This study employs a machine learning-enhanced classical density functional theory to demonstrate that in confined azeotropic mixtures, adsorption selectivity vanishes at the bulk azeotropic composition due to specific bulk thermodynamic conditions (equal partial molar volumes and extremal compressibility) that create a corresponding "aneotrope" in the interfacial free energy, a phenomenon that persists even in the supercritical regime.
This paper derives exact analytical results showing that U(1) symmetry substantially suppresses non-stabilizerness (magic) in random states compared to the unconstrained case, and validates these predictions against chaotic many-body models, revealing that magic is more robust to charge density fluctuations than entanglement and that interaction locality significantly influences the agreement between theory and specific system eigenstates.