2356 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 investigates a two-species model with asymmetric coupling that exhibits a multicritical point where the mutant species follows directed percolation universality while the primary species displays unusual non-scale-invariant critical dynamics characterized by fluctuation-induced logarithmic modulations below its distinct upper critical dimension.
This paper introduces a diagnostic framework based on the full probability distribution of quantum coherence, demonstrating that its entropy serves as a robust indicator for identifying single-particle and many-body phases at finite temperatures, even in the presence of thermal fluctuations.
This paper experimentally validates the fundamental prediction of universal scaling in ultracold lattice Bose gases by demonstrating that microscopic details can be captured by just two scale factors to collapse order-parameter cumulants and correlations onto universal functions, thereby simultaneously determining critical exponents , , and across the superfluid transition.
This paper utilizes self-consistent relaxation theory to define the Frenkel line in Yukawa fluids as the thermodynamic boundary where the roton minimum in the longitudinal excitation dispersion relation vanishes, demonstrating that this dynamic crossover can be directly determined from the static structure factor and aligns with molecular dynamics simulation results.
This paper establishes a theoretical framework classifying optimal control of stochastic systems into three canonical equivalence classes that exhibit sharp finite-time transitions, and demonstrates a mapping between these control costs and non-equilibrium relaxation rate functions, enabling the experimental observation of otherwise inaccessible dynamical phase transitions through optimally controlled trajectories.
This paper resolves the long-standing problem of computing the quenched complexity of marginal metastable states in the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick spin glass model using a one-step replica symmetry breaking Ansatz, revealing that the complexity vanishes near the full-RSB equilibrium free energy and suggesting that the lowest marginal states correspond to the equilibrium states themselves.
Using matrix-product-state simulations, this study provides evidence for discrete time-crystalline behavior in strongly disordered anisotropic Heisenberg chains under periodic driving, revealing a stable subharmonic response and characterizing an intermediate dynamical regime between time-crystalline and Floquet-localized phases through various quantum observables.
This paper introduces "tree-unitary" quantum circuits on tree graphs that are exactly solvable and preserve tree symmetries, revealing a unique trade-off between maximum butterfly velocity and multi-directional correlations inherent to non-Euclidean geometries, with the kicked Ising model serving as a key physical example.
Through large-scale Monte Carlo simulations in two and three dimensions, this study demonstrates that the multicritical contact process, where both dilution and spatially varying infection rates drive the transition, exhibits universal ultra-slow activated scaling consistent with the strong disorder renormalization group and places it in the same universality class as the multicritical quantum Ising model.
This paper presents numerical and analytical evidence for the spontaneous breaking of a continuous symmetry at a non-conformal quantum critical point in a one-dimensional spin-1 chain, revealing a novel mechanism where the critical point exhibits Kardar-Parisi-Zhang dynamics () and true long-range order distinct from established universality classes.