1537 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 establishes a unified thermodynamic framework that characterizes the finite-time performance of interacting active machines by decomposing cyclic work into geometric components, revealing that optimal energy conversion is governed by a curvature-induced Lorentz-like effect and shares fundamental scaling laws with thermoelectric devices.
This study reveals that the Mpemba effect in one-dimensional overdamped Langevin dynamics is primarily driven by the presence of boundaries rather than the specific internal structure of the potential landscape, a mechanism elucidated through spectral decomposition that enables the unified classification and engineering of such systems.
This paper investigates chemophoretic active matter with nonreciprocal interactions, revealing a re-entrant phase diagram where chemoattraction drives macroscopic phase separation through cluster coalescence, while chemorepulsion leads to steady-state microphase separation due to caging and fragmentation.
This paper investigates operator spreading in random quantum circuits with orthogonal or symplectic symmetry, revealing distinct features such as ternary-valued weight relaxation, finite-width domain walls, and a fundamental dichotomy in butterfly velocity behavior that differs significantly from the well-studied unitary-invariant case.
Using computer simulations, this study investigates the phase behavior and dynamics of two-dimensional active Brownian particles in a homogeneous alignment field, mapping phase boundaries and critical points that deviate from the 2D Ising universality class while characterizing spinodal decomposition to inform optimal active matter transport.
This paper presents a maximum likelihood approach to simultaneously infer dynamical stochastic models and estimate population heterogeneity for actively driven particles using second-order Langevin dynamics on discretely sampled trajectory data, demonstrating superior performance for short trajectories and providing a framework for quantifying uncertainty.
This paper provides numerical evidence supporting the non-Abelian eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) through simulations of a 1D Heisenberg chain and offers an analytical proof of its self-consistency, thereby establishing a framework for understanding thermalization in quantum systems with non-commuting conserved quantities.
This paper proposes a minimal micropolar model to demonstrate that odd elasticity naturally emerges as a nonlinear effect of internal particle rotations in disordered chiral active materials, revealing new dynamically unstable regions and bulk wave propagation driven by odd solid-fluid coupling.
This paper establishes a mathematical theorem demonstrating that linear discrete-time dynamics with weak memory effects can be systematically reduced to a unique first-order Markovian evolution on an intermediate time scale, a result illustrated through applications to stochastic Floquet and quantum collisional models.
This paper demonstrates that in the Edwards-Anderson Ising spin glass, the non-existence of space-filling critical droplets implies that incongruent ground states would exhibit volume-scaling energy variance, a result which proves the uniqueness of the metastate in two dimensions and establishes that excitations with positive-density interfaces have energy differences diverging as the square root of the volume.