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 landscape-agnostic study of rare dynamical events in mean-field disordered systems that reveals a rich diversity of instanton structures beyond classical nucleation theory, thereby identifying the point of irreversibility and clarifying the landscape features governing activated relaxation in the RFOT universality class.
This study combines variational analysis and molecular dynamics simulations to map the ground-state phase diagram of two-dimensional core-softened particles, revealing a rich landscape of cluster lattices, Bravais structures, and frustration-induced quasicrystals driven by competing length scales.
This paper establishes a unified formalism for the symmetric and antisymmetric components of integrated covariances in nonequilibrium steady states, expressing them via excess observables and deriving thermodynamic bounds that link antisymmetric fluctuations and self-averaging speedups to entropy production and cycle affinities.
This paper presents and experimentally validates an efficient protocol that utilizes classical shadows from local randomized measurements to learn the matrix-product operator representation of large-scale mixed quantum states, successfully demonstrated on a superconducting processor with up to 96 qubits.
This paper proposes a simple yet reliable analytical framework based on a compounding formula and tension propagation to characterize the non-Markovian, out-of-equilibrium transient and steady-state dynamics of active polymers driven by persistent noise, with anticipated applications to various spatially extended systems.
This paper reviews various physical models, ranging from discrete to continuum approaches, used to understand the mechanics and coordination of embryonic epithelial wound healing, while highlighting the trade-offs between complexity and interpretability and proposing future directions for hybrid modeling and experimental integration.
This paper establishes a generalized hydrodynamic framework that extends equilibrium Green-Kubo relations to non-equilibrium steady states with memory, revealing how chemical driving in active fluids generates unique active viscoelastic memory capable of producing negative storage and loss moduli.
This study demonstrates that introducing competitive cyclic loops within active Potts models allows for the control of spatially coexisting states and pattern formation—ranging from simultaneous spiral waves to stochastic switching and homogeneous cycling—by tuning flip energies and the specific network topology of the state transitions.
This paper proposes a tunable quantum system combining a frozen qubit with a chaotic thermal bath that, under selective state observation, exhibits a novel "Wigner Cat Phase" characterized by bimodal "cat-ears" eigenstates and heavy-tailed level spacing statistics, representing a distinct non-thermal transition between quantum chaos and many-body localization that challenges standard integrability detection methods.
This paper demonstrates that the saturation of cumulative observables in systems with propagating signals is a universal consequence of local linear relaxation, establishing a geometry-independent bound determined solely by the relaxation time that transitions from linear growth to saturation.