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 establishes a holographic duality framework using isometric tensor network states to demonstrate that strong-to-weak spontaneous symmetry breaking in the steady states of -dimensional quantum channels with strong symmetries corresponds to anyon condensation on the boundary of a -dimensional topological order.
This paper derives a generalized Langevin equation for a tracer in a non-reciprocal active or passive bath, revealing that non-reciprocal interactions induce a resonance-driven "giant diffusivity" regime accompanied by significant heat dissipation, thereby establishing a direct thermodynamic cost for enhanced transport.
This paper extends the Bayesian tracking of a diffusing target from one to two and three dimensions, revealing a rich phase structure where optimal inference succeeds in 2D while suboptimal inference can fail, and in 3D, tracking can succeed or fail via delocalization or false localization, with these transitions governed by Edwards-Wilkinson or Kardar-Parisi-Zhang statistics and meeting at a Nishimori-like multicritical point.
This paper demonstrates that size-dependent growth rates, arising from finite facet effects like nucleation barriers and ligand coverages, can amplify infinitesimal seed asymmetries into strongly asymmetric nanocrystal morphologies even when all symmetry-related facets follow identical microscopic growth laws.
This paper establishes an exact duality between the level statistics of Hermitian and non-Hermitian random matrices in the large- limit, utilizing analytic continuation of fermionic nonlinear models to derive universal bulk pair-correlation functions and hard-edge spectral densities across all Wigner--Dyson and Altland--Zirnbauer symmetry classes.
This paper solves the long-standing problem of determining exact joint eigenvalue densities for non-Hermitian matrices with transposition symmetry by revealing that, up to a Vandermonde factor, these densities correspond to Calogero model scattering states with power-law tails that defy the traditional Coulomb gas description.
The paper demonstrates that for any potential with a discrete energy spectrum, interpolating between ideal boson and fermion partition functions at specific discrete values yields ground state energies equivalent to fermions in a single quantum state, a result that can be interpreted as arising from genuine parastatistics.
This study demonstrates that the durability of cohesive granular materials under repeated vibration is governed primarily by the number of cohesive bonds rather than their individual strength, as evidenced by a mixed-grain system where the failure lifetime scales with the square of the cohesive contact fraction.
This paper demonstrates that feedback can enhance quantum metrology and clock precision by converting continuously monitored quantum jumps into a thermodynamic resource, deriving a modified thermodynamic uncertainty relation where the information entropy production of the feedback apparatus compensates for the lack of increased average thermodynamic currents.
This paper demonstrates that a one-dimensional fractional Ginzburg--Landau model with marginal dispersion () exhibits BKT-like correlation scaling and a finite-temperature transition, despite lacking the universal helicity modulus jump characteristic of the two-dimensional XY model.