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 proposes a minimal theory of frustrated neural timing by mapping repulsively coupled rhythmic neurons onto antiferromagnetic XY models, demonstrating that geometrical frustration in neural networks creates a complex energy landscape where zero-temperature relaxation suppresses global synchrony in favor of structured, low-energy metastable states rather than disordered activity.
This review article presents a unifying perspective on strong-to-weak spontaneous symmetry breaking (SW-SSB) as a framework for analyzing phases of matter in open systems, connecting concepts ranging from topological orders and emergent hydrodynamics to information-theoretic characterizations.
This paper proposes a phenomenological framework for social dynamics that adapts mechanical concepts like position-dependent inertia, force, and motion to model social change and evolution, demonstrating its utility by analyzing partisan preference distributions in US presidential elections.
The paper argues that in one-dimensional chaotic quantum systems with conservation laws, local correlations decay subexponentially (as stretched exponentials or slower) due to the coherent persistence of inert "void" regions, a phenomenon that standard hydrodynamics fails to capture and which vanishes under extrinsic dephasing.
This paper develops a method using coarse-graining and martingale techniques to derive refined thermodynamic bounds for first-passage problems of fluctuating currents in Markov chains, demonstrating that effective affinity extends to discrete-time systems and that optimal currents exhibit a symmetry where the average speeds to reach positive and negative thresholds are equal.
This paper establishes a first-principles framework using thermal time-dependent density functional theory to calculate full quantum work statistics and dissipated-work moments in interacting many-body systems, demonstrating its predictive power in analyzing the Mott-to-band-insulator crossover within the Hubbard model.
This paper employs the functional renormalization group in the Local Potential Approximation to trace critical and multicritical Lee-Yang fixed points from their upper critical dimensions down to two dimensions, successfully following the case while revealing that higher-order multicritical fixed points () annihilate with non-perturbative solutions before reaching .
This paper establishes a rigorous mathematical framework for dynamic emergent constraints in climate science using linear response theory, introducing "integral dynamic emergent constraints" that relate the responses of different observables to the same forcing via convolution and a proxy Green's function, and validates this approach using global warming simulations from the MPI-ESM model.
This study demonstrates that introducing nonequilibrium activity into systems with fluctuation-induced first-order transitions systematically suppresses fluctuation effects, thereby enhancing ordering and shifting the transition toward mean-field behavior without inducing spinodal instability.
This paper establishes a generalized finite-time scaling framework that unifies the Kibble-Zurek and De Grandi-Gritsev-Polkovnikov limits, providing a universal description of driven critical dynamics across the full range of driving rates in quantum many-body systems.