cond-mat.stat-mech 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.

🔢 mathematics

Current fluctuations in a gas of active Ornstein-Uhlenbeck particles

This paper investigates the time-integrated current statistics in an infinite one-dimensional gas of independent active Ornstein-Uhlenbeck particles, revealing distinct diffusive, super-diffusive, and sub-diffusive regimes governed by a single scaled cumulant generating function, a persistent memory of initial conditions, and temporal correlations, all validated by rare-event importance sampling capable of resolving probabilities as low as $10^{-1000}$ .

Sandeep Jangid, Aman Kumbhakar, Juliane U. Klamser, Tridib Sadhu2026-08-27

🔬 mesoscale physics

Topology of Fluctuation Bands in Chiral Active Matter

This paper demonstrates that in chiral active matter, nonequilibrium noise can induce topological bands with nonzero Chern numbers in the displacement fluctuation spectrum, creating boundary-localized modes distinct from deterministic mechanical edge states despite trivial underlying mechanics.

Raphaël Maire2026-08-27

⚛️ quantum physics

Yang-Lee Criticality as a Dissipative Dynamical Phase Transition: Quantum Simulation of non-Hermitian Physics without Post-selection

This paper proposes a method to realize Yang-Lee criticality and simulate arbitrary non-Hermitian Hamiltonians in open quantum systems without post-selection by engineering local dissipation and unitary dynamics, thereby enabling the direct observation of dissipative phase transitions and non-unitary statistical mechanics on near-term quantum devices.

Stephen W. Yan2026-08-27

🌀 nonlinear sciences

Dissipation and fluctuations of CMOS ring oscillators close to criticality

This paper analyzes CMOS ring oscillators near criticality by deriving a thermodynamically consistent Hopf bifurcation normal form to demonstrate that entropy dissipation decreases with increased stability in the oscillating state, while finite-size fluctuations induce noise-driven oscillations with anomalously short decoherence times that scale sub-linearly with system size.

Ashwin Gopal, Massimiliano Esposito, Jan Meibohm2026-08-26

⚛️ high-energy theory

Self-dual Higgs transitions: Toric code and beyond

This paper proposes a continuum field theory, specifically the $SO(4)_{k,-k}$ Chern-Simons-Higgs model, to describe self-dual Higgs transitions from various non-Abelian topological orders to trivial states, offering a unified framework that generalizes the enigmatic toric code transition and conjectures an infrared duality to the 3D Ising transition for the $k=1$ case.

Wenjie Ji, Ryan A. Lanzetta, Zheng Zhou, Chong Wang2026-08-26

🧬 biology

Spatiotemporal noise stabilizes unbounded diversity in strongly-competitive communities

By extending the generalized Lotka-Volterra model to include both spatial structure and environmental fluctuations, this study demonstrates that the combination of spatiotemporal noise, rather than either factor alone, stabilizes arbitrarily high biodiversity in strongly competitive communities through an emergent sublinear self-inhibition mechanism that resolves the classic diversity-stability paradox.

Amer Al-Hiyasat, Daniel W. Swartz, Jeff Gore, Mehran Kardar2026-08-26

🤖 machine learning

Renormalization Group Flow Matching for Scalable Local Generative Modeling

This paper introduces Renormalization Group Flow Matching (RGFM), a scalable generative framework that leverages renormalization group principles to enable local models to accurately reproduce long-range correlations and global coherence with nearly linear computational cost.

Kanta Masuki, Yuto Ashida2026-08-26

🔬 condensed matter

Weak irreducibility as a spectral criterion for phase coexistence

This paper proposes that genuine thermodynamic phase coexistence is a singular limit of finite-size avoided coexistence, distinguished by the spectral criterion that interfacial costs in short-range systems exponentially suppress connectivity to restore reducibility, whereas pseudo-transitions retain finite connectivity.

Onofre Rojas2026-08-26

🔬 condensed matter

Entropy Production Bounds the Accuracy of Computation in Markov Networks

This paper establishes a universal thermodynamic bound demonstrating that the accuracy of dynamical computation in reversible continuous-time Markov networks is fundamentally limited by the trade-off between entropy production, memory time, and the inevitable lag error caused by finite relaxation timescales.

Songela W. Chen, David T. Limmer2026-08-26

🔬 condensed matter

Jamming states in random sequential adsorption of diffusion-limited aggregates

This study reveals that the irreversible adsorption of diffusion-limited aggregation clusters on a square lattice exhibits jamming densities that decrease as a power law with cluster size, where increased shape diversity promotes denser packing and distinct scaling behaviors in density fluctuations depending on whether the cluster shape pool is fixed or refreshed across realizations.

Fahad Puthalath, Dipanjan Mandal, Sumanta Kundu2026-08-26

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