2407 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 presents a unified machine learning framework that combines machine-learned interatomic potentials with neural classical density functional theory to enable efficient, first-principles multiscale modeling of liquid thermodynamics and phase behavior across homogeneous and inhomogeneous systems.
This dissertation investigates the weak breaking of ergodicity in the constrained PXP spin chain model, demonstrating that while it exhibits signatures of quantum chaos like Wigner-Dyson statistics and ballistic energy spreading, it uniquely hosts a small number of eigenstates that violate the Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis and display non-Gaussian eigenvector statistics.
This paper reveals that Diffusion Transformers mechanistically resolve generative ambiguity through an intrinsic, depth-localized "synchronization gap" where global structures commit before local details, a phenomenon that can be explicitly controlled and collapsed via symmetric cross-attention coupling in the network's terminal layers.
This paper demonstrates that in a biased donation game, a weakened Tit-for-Tat strategy can unexpectedly dominate the population through a "survival of the weakest" mechanism, where suppressing its own fitness relative to unconditional cooperators allows it to eliminate cyclic dominance clusters and eventually take over the entire structured population.
Motivated by recent works of Lewin, Lieb, and Seiringer, this paper proposes rigorous definitions of the quantum and classical non-uniform electron gas via grand-canonical functionals, establishes them as thermodynamic limits, and analyzes their properties in the presence of an arbitrary lattice-periodic background density.
This paper resolves the long-standing puzzle of free volume in the hard disk model by deriving exact analytical formulae based on intersection areas of exclusion circles, thereby establishing a statistical mechanics framework that accurately recovers the equation of state across the entire density range and reveals a mixed liquid regime associated with defect formation.
This paper numerically and analytically investigates sparse random matrices with on-site disorder to demonstrate that the Anderson transition can be identified via ground state statistics, revealing a broad nonergodic regime within the delocalized phase characterized by distinct short- and long-range energy correlations.
Using a Lindblad master-equation approach, this study reveals that open photon condensates in dye-filled microcavities exhibit long-lived metastable plateaus stabilized by ghost attractors with quasithermal fluctuations and undergo multiple non-Hermitian phase transitions driven by exceptional points in their relaxation dynamics.
This paper proposes a "nonintrinsic sector" of Landau theory where externally written microscale fields survive coarse graining to become spatially prescribed coefficients in the free-energy functional, a phenomenon realized in ion-patterned FeRh under specific correlation and frustration length hierarchies.
Through extensive molecular dynamics simulations with particles, this paper demonstrates that linear stability analysis of the Vlasov equation fails to predict the true nature and location of phase transitions in a generalized Hamiltonian Mean Field model, revealing instead that the actual paramagnetic-to-ferromagnetic transition is discontinuous and occurs at significantly higher coupling strengths than the instability thresholds identified by previous bifurcation analysis.