2405 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 collective charging of an N-qubit quantum battery coupled to a dephased charger exhibits an "asymptotic freedom"-like behavior where the ergotropy-to-energy ratio approaches unity as in the large-N limit, driven by approximate ground-state degeneracy despite the battery remaining in a mixed state.
This paper derives a quantum extension of the thermodynamic uncertainty relation using the Terletsky-Margenau-Hill quasiprobability to demonstrate that surpassing classical output-to-dissipation limits requires basis-independent anomalous behaviors, such as negativity, rather than quantum coherence alone.
This paper proposes a thermodynamically consistent model demonstrating that driven, nonequilibrium protein complexes can function as stochastic molecular automata, thereby providing a framework for engineering error-tolerant memory, molecular stopwatches, and finite-state machines within living cells.
This paper investigates how simultaneous resetting with memory induces correlations between the components of an -dimensional diffusive walker, revealing that weak memory leads to monotonic growth toward a steady-state correlation while long-ranged memory produces non-monotonic behavior, with all regimes unified by a conditional independence framework.
This paper establishes an exact 1D-2D correspondence for 2D fermions in a rotating trap (generalizing the Lowest Landau Level problem), enabling a simplified 1D quantum mechanical description of the system's density and entanglement entropy while revealing unique noncommutative features such as the absence of logarithmic scaling in the latter.
This paper demonstrates that fractional space-time epidemic dynamics emerge naturally from first principles by mapping stochastic contagion to a non-equilibrium quantum field theory, where integrating out host vacuum fluctuations generates anomalous scaling that transforms the effective reproductive number into a spectral dispersion relation capable of modeling Lévy flight super-spreading and temporal avalanches.
This study demonstrates that hydrated DNA under magnetic excitation exhibits discrete, topologically quantized macroscopic attractor states characterized by telegraph-switching polarization voltages, revealing how dissipative dynamics constrained by phase topology can induce macroscopic quantization in classical systems at ambient conditions.
This paper demonstrates that deforming the spin-1 Babujian-Takhtajan chain with its third conserved charge, which acts as a dressed scalar-chirality operator, induces a quantum phase transition into a gapless, chiral current-carrying state described by a conformal field theory, a phenomenon verified through thermodynamic Bethe ansatz and DMRG simulations.
This paper presents an exact analytical framework based on the Fokker-Planck equation to characterize the transient and steady-state dynamics of chiral active Brownian particles in harmonic traps, revealing that dimensionality critically dictates the behavior of excess kurtosis, which exhibits damped oscillatory crossovers in two dimensions but remains negative in three dimensions.
This paper proposes two generalized Caldeira-Leggett models to describe thermophoresis in quantum Brownian particles driven by thermal gradients, thereby addressing a previously open problem in the field.