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 demonstrates that a boundary-controlled information engine utilizing self-propelled bristle bots exhibits a qualitatively distinct work-output relationship and a density-dependent regime switch compared to thermal systems, a nonequilibrium feature attributed to the accumulation of active particles near boundaries.
This paper demonstrates that while any classical admixture causes quantum walks to become diffusive with a first-order pole near the quantum limit, the specific temporal ordering of quantum and classical steps determines the amplitude of this diffusion coefficient, differing by a factor of two between protocols despite identical step rates.
This paper investigates the relationship between the renormalization group (RG) and long-range conditional mutual information (CMI), demonstrating that while RG constraints typically ensure UV-finiteness, specific hierarchical models can exhibit divergent Markov lengths or polynomial CMI decay under RG flow despite admitting simple, stable RG descriptions.
This paper models Stochastic Gradient Descent dynamics as a percolation process where architectural symmetries drive the formation of simpler subnetworks through discrete, simultaneous block merges, manifesting as variance spikes and scaling cascades that also apply to Adam and AdamW under heavy-tailed noise.
This paper demonstrates that time-delayed self-interactions in many-body systems can generate non-equilibrium phenomena, including helical vortices and unconventional long-range order that circumvents the Mermin-Wagner theorem, offering a new paradigm for engineering active metamaterials.
This paper formulates an inverse-design framework for Brownian heat engines that derives exact solutions for optimizing temperature profiles and barrier heights, revealing that while the hot-uphill/cold-downhill profile uniquely maximizes quasistatic efficiency, finite-current optimization requires a distinct balance between thermal rectification and transport resistance.
This paper investigates the long-time power-law decay of the survival probability for a Brownian particle in a partially reactive wedge by employing matched asymptotic analysis to determine the persistence exponent for arbitrary angles and explicitly calculating the prefactor for specific wedge geometries, while also deriving the associated boundary local time and first-crossing time distributions.
This paper numerically demonstrates that athermal quasistatic pinching serves as a minimal local probe for amorphous solids, revealing a transition from linear elastic, dipolar responses to plastic regimes where the nature of rearrangements—ranging from localized events in well-annealed glasses to system-spanning cascades in poorly annealed ones—is governed by both the imposed extension and the material's stability.
This paper employs Full Counting Statistics and optimal control via the Chopped Random Basis protocol to analyze fluctuations and enhance amplification in a three-qubit Floquet quantum thermal transistor, revealing a trade-off between precision and base current while demonstrating the system's potential for heat modulation in near-term quantum technologies.
This paper demonstrates that frustration-enhanced quantum annealing correction models, specifically the penalty spin and stacked models with additional inter-replica interactions, can efficiently find optimal solutions for problems with small energy gaps by exploiting diabatic transitions within short annealing times, thereby offering a practical approach to mitigate errors in noisy, runtime-limited quantum hardware.