2440 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 constructs a generic field theory to demonstrate that driven granular liquids can exhibit broken Kolmogorov scaling and form a new universality class due to unique symmetry properties, despite preserving most symmetries found in Newtonian flows.
This paper proposes a rigorous entropic-force theory demonstrating that stochasticity and discrete-time updates in neural network training generate emergent forces that break continuous symmetries to explain universal representation alignment, the Platonic Representation Hypothesis, and the reconciliation of sharpness- and flatness-seeking optimization behaviors.
This paper introduces a likelihood-based method to analyze discretely sampled trajectories of passive beads driven by active ameboid cells, revealing that the system's motility heterogeneity is non-stationary and time-dependent.
This paper derives the asymptotic expansion of the partition function for a Coulomb gas system on compact Riemann surfaces of any genus by employing a bosonization formula to relate analytic torsion and geometric quantities, thereby proving the geometric version of the Zabrodin-Wiegmann conjecture in the determinantal case.
This paper introduces a dual formulation for the one-dimensional long-range Ising model that becomes weakly coupled near the short-range crossover at , enabling the precise perturbative computation of conformal field theory data via both renormalization and the analytic conformal bootstrap, which yield complete agreement.
This paper presents an exact analytical solution for a free-fermion chain under an arbitrary time-dependent linear potential, revealing self-similar dynamics and deriving hydrodynamic predictions for density, current, and entanglement entropy, including the emergence of a breathing interface region interpreted as Wannier-Stark localization in the sudden quench limit.
This paper proposes a universal theoretical framework to derive the joint probability density and correlation coefficient between a diffusing particle's first-reaction time and its accumulated boundary local time, providing explicit analytical solutions for various domains and validating them with Monte Carlo simulations to explore the effects of boundary reactivity, shape, and interior obstacles.
This paper presents a spatially-explicit Prisoner's Dilemma model demonstrating that populations with high truth-telling probabilities evolve into stable groups of cooperative truth-tellers, while those with low probabilities become stable groups of lying defectors, as intermediate values yield lower average scores.
This paper demonstrates that continuous quantum measurements can be used to tailor the dynamical signatures of quantum chaos, specifically by extending the ramp in the generalized spectral form factor, with unit-efficiency monitoring revealing enhanced chaotic behavior compared to both average dynamics and unitary evolution.
This paper demonstrates that passive qubit reset times can be significantly accelerated by exploiting the Mpemba effect through a simple entangling gate protocol that converts slow-decaying local coherences into fast-decaying global coherences, a method validated both theoretically and experimentally on a superconducting quantum processor.