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.
This paper clarifies subtle aspects of coherent-state path integrals in quantum thermodynamics, demonstrating that when properly handled in the continuum limit, they yield results consistent with the canonical Hamiltonian approach across various paradigmatic bosonic and fermionic systems.
This paper utilizes thermofield dynamics and the correspondence between low-energy excitations and Fisher zeros to analyze the quantum XY chain, revealing that "giant bubbles" of Fisher zeros near the gapless XX limit provide a characteristic energy scale that contradicts standard Luttinger liquid theory and links spectral weight transfer to unconventional gap behaviors.
This paper demonstrates that deliberately breaking detailed balance in diffusion models by introducing non-reversible, rotational perturbations can accelerate the reverse process and speciation time without altering the stationary distribution, while leaving the collapse transition unaffected.
This paper characterizes the extreme points of entrance laws for systems of instantaneously annihilating or coalescing Brownian motions on the line as Pfaffian point processes and explicitly identifies their kernels.
This paper establishes that the invariant distributions of random walks on randomly weighted complete digraphs asymptotically converge to distributions determined by vertex weights or become uniform, depending on the moment conditions of the edge weights, thereby characterizing the principal left eigenvectors of these random Markov matrices.
This paper investigates how increasing the interaction range in a two-dimensional Potts model alters the order of its phase transition, utilizing partition function zeros to identify the specific number of interacting neighbors that triggers a shift from second-order to first-order behavior.
This paper establishes the first analytical description of the Sub-Optimal Transport model by developing a mean-field theory that characterizes the smooth crossover between entropy-dominated and cost-dominated regimes, revealing that local fluctuations become sub-extensive and allowing for exact solutions of thermodynamic observables in intermediate regimes.
This paper establishes a conceptual framework for nonequilibrium calorimetry to study biological systems, demonstrating through biophysical models of ciliary and molecular motor motion that biological activity can lead to intriguing heat capacity dependencies, including negative values.
This paper proposes a novel, model-agnostic metric for structural complexity based on lossless image compression, demonstrating that this information-theoretic measure peaks precisely at the critical temperature of the 2D Ising model, thereby effectively quantifying the emergence of complex structures at the boundary between order and disorder.
This paper demonstrates that while the relative entropy from a non-equilibrium to an equilibrium ensemble represents the standard excess free energy, the reverse relative entropy corresponds to the excess free energy of a dual ensemble where the roles of energy and entropy are interchanged.