2422 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.
Through extensive numerical simulations of fully flexible elastic tethered surfaces with tunable self-avoidance and perforations, the authors demonstrate that such surfaces remain flat with a size exponent of in the thermodynamic limit for any finite degree of self-avoidance, contradicting theories that predict crumpling in the absence of bending rigidity.
This paper demonstrates that the Gouy-Stodola theorem applies to classical mechanical systems by showing that a simple pendulum subject to velocity-dependent non-conservative forces exhibits positive entropy generation proportional to the rate of energy dissipation, whereas an ideal conservative system exhibits zero entropy generation.
This paper resolves the apparent contradiction between the nonzero residual entropy of glasses and the third law of thermodynamics by redefining equilibrium states through atomic positions, demonstrating that residual entropy arises from evaluating the system on an extended space of frozen configurations while the entropy of the single thermally active configuration strictly vanishes at absolute zero.
This paper investigates the convergence of the partition function for negative mass systems, demonstrating that while assuming negative absolute temperature yields complex physical quantities, introducing an imaginary velocity while maintaining positive temperature results in a positive partition function and real entropy, suggesting the latter approach is more physically plausible.
This paper introduces a new holographic method for calculating entanglement entropy in 1+1d CFTs with multiple boundaries, successfully reproducing known results for double-split quenches while establishing a framework for future studies of systems with more than two splits and nonzero temperatures.
This study demonstrates that the boundary shape of a confined classical hard disk system dictates its thermalization outcome, where circular boundaries induce a non-ergodic Generalized Gibbs Ensemble characterized by conserved angular momentum and near-boundary condensation, in contrast to the standard Gibbs Ensemble observed with square boundaries.
This paper demonstrates that stochastic resetting can control spatiotemporal chaos in dynamical systems by inducing a phase transition at a critical rate where both the Lyapunov exponent and butterfly velocity vanish, effectively halting the spread of information.
This paper proposes a method to improve quantum annealing efficiency for problems with small energy gaps by introducing controlled diagonal catalysts that exploit diabatic transitions, achieving an approximate quadratic speedup in the exponential scaling exponent of the time to solution.
This paper demonstrates that a constrained kagome Ising antiferromagnet with infinite first and third neighbor couplings exhibits a topological devil's staircase characterized by an infinite series of thermal first-order transitions where quantized linear defects condense, creating a partially ordered low-temperature phase with a finite density of zero-energy domain walls and non-commensurate wave-vectors.
This paper derives a self-consistent hydrodynamic theory for coupled binary-fluid-surfactant systems by modeling surfactants as Brownian dumbbells and applying Rayleigh's variational principle to obtain continuum equations that accurately capture phenomena like surface tension reduction and droplet stabilization.