2446 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 duality between open many-body systems satisfying detailed balance and closed bilayer systems, revealing that the identity operator and specific eigen-operators of the Lindbladian map to quantum many-body scars in the form of thermofield double states with tunable entanglement and exponential decay dynamics.
Using Generalized Hydrodynamics, this study reveals that charge transport in the quantum sine-Gordon model is predominantly diffusive rather than ballistic, driven by non-diagonal scattering of internal charge degrees of freedom that causes the Onsager matrix to diverge near specific coupling strengths.
Inspired by the one-dimensional Potts model, this paper constructs a context-sensitive random language model that exhibits a Berezinskii--Kosterlitz--Thouless (BKT) phase transition, suggesting that the critical properties observed in natural languages may arise generically from underlying BKT phases rather than requiring fine-tuning or self-organized criticality.
This paper investigates the robustness of Floquet codes under local decoherence by deriving a 3D statistical mechanics model for their maximum likelihood decoder, identifying specific Pauli channels with decoupled thresholds, and proposing a diagnostic that distinguishes the code's anyon automorphism phase from the toric code via a phase transition at the decoherence threshold.
This paper introduces an efficient simulation framework that models Generalized Hydrodynamics as a gas of interacting semiclassical wave packets, enabling fast large-scale studies of quasi-integrable systems with integrability-breaking perturbations while revealing that long-range correlations can persist indefinitely even when local observables appear thermalized.
This perspective paper clarifies the scientific concept of emergence as a measurable, physically grounded phenomenon arising from local interactions constrained by global boundaries, using concrete examples to demonstrate that it offers genuine insight into complex systems rather than mysticism.
These pedagogical lecture notes introduce Zubarev's 1960 double-time Green's function technique, demonstrating its application to non-interacting gases, the Hubbard model's Stoner criterion for ferromagnetism, and superconductivity for readers with only a basic understanding of second quantization.
This paper provides a survey of experimental evidence and presents a general theoretical approach for describing mesoscopic fluctuations—nanoscale variations distinct from their surroundings that occur across diverse systems ranging from condensed matter to biological and social networks.
This paper proposes SBO-QAOA, a temperature-targeted quantum algorithm based on quantum-classical correspondence theory that achieves fair sampling of degenerate ground states by converging to a uniform Gibbs distribution, overcoming the biases inherent in standard QAOA even with minimal variational parameters.
This paper demonstrates that intermittent resetting strategies, particularly those with fluctuating (annealed) coordinates, significantly optimize the search time of active Brownian walkers in noisy, confined environments by mitigating inherent search time fluctuations.