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.

🔬 condensed matter

Giant Thermal Amplification via Engineered Dissipation in a Sierpiski-Gasket Aharonov-Bohm Interferometer

This paper proposes a three-terminal thermal amplifier based on a Sierpinski-gasket Aharonov-Bohm interferometer that utilizes engineered dissipation and quantum interference to achieve giant, magnetic-flux-controlled thermal amplification through an emergent thermal transparency mechanism where the base terminal's heat response is cancelled without requiring resonant transmission.

Shubhra Shubhadarshini Mallick, Salil Bedkihal, Mattias Fitzpatrick, Malay Bandyopadhyay2026-08-18

🔬 condensed matter

Mean-squared displacement and variance for confined Brownian motion

This paper quantitatively analyzes the mean-squared displacement and variance of confined Brownian motion in one and higher dimensions by deriving analytical expressions for the time-dependent diffusion exponent and short-time behaviors under Dirichlet boundary conditions and various initial probability distributions, revealing sub-diffusive characteristics in the intermediate confinement regime that align with recent micro-nano experimental observations.

Yi Liao, Xiao-Bo Gong2026-08-17

🔬 condensed matter

Emergent odd viscoelasticity in chiral soft glassy materials

This paper introduces a chiral soft glassy rheology model of actively rotating inclusions in a glassy matrix to demonstrate how odd viscoelastic responses emerge, revealing that odd viscosity increases as active rotation slows and that oscillatory shear induces a complex spectrum combining resonance effects with glassy power laws.

Debarghya Banerjee, Peter Sollich2026-08-17

🔬 condensed matter

On first-order thermodynamic equilibrium conditions for fluid-fluid and solid-phase interfaces

This paper develops a unified thermodynamic framework for fluid-fluid and solid-fluid interfaces by extending the Larché and Cahn variational formulation to incorporate interfacial thermodynamics directly, thereby deriving both bulk and interfacial equilibrium conditions as stationarity conditions of a single functional.

Nicodemo Di Pasquale, Thomas Hudson2026-08-17

⚛️ quantum physics

Open system probes of renormalization group flow

This paper proposes using open system probes, such as a qubit coupled to a transverse-field Ising model, to characterize quantum many-body systems by mapping long-range spatial correlations onto dynamical probe correlations, thereby enabling the identification of renormalization group fixed points, scaling dimensions, and flow behaviors.

Andrew Keefe, Brenden Bowen, Saptarshi Biswas, Albion Lawrence, Nishant Agarwal, Archana Kamal2026-08-17

⚛️ quantum physics

Nonorthogonal-state erasure as the resource behind apparent second-law violations

This paper demonstrates that apparent violations of the second law of thermodynamics in quantum Szilard engines are not enabled by the hypothetical distinguishing of nonorthogonal states, but rather by the entropy-decreasing operation of nonorthogonal-state erasure.

Xinshu Xia, Hui Hui Qin, Yu-Han Ma, Chang-Pu Sun, Hui Dong2026-08-17

⚛️ high-energy theory

Information Spreading in Diffusion Models from Effective Field Theory

This paper demonstrates that the inductive bias of locality in convolutional score-matching diffusion models allows their denoising dynamics to be effectively described using Effective Field Theory, with mutual information growth between points aligning with predictions from a Brownian motion model on both toy examples and MNIST.

Navonil Neogi, Nabil Iqbal2026-08-17

🔬 condensed matter

Linear response across interaction regimes in two-dimensional ferromagnets

This paper introduces an efficient Gaussian-based method to solve the quantum Boltzmann equation for two-dimensional ferromagnets, successfully modeling the temperature-driven crossover from ballistic to hydrodynamic magnon transport and demonstrating strong agreement with experimental data on monolayer CrCl $_3$ .

Aaron Müller, Pavel E. Dolgirev, Oleksii Malyshev, Eugene Demler2026-08-17

🔬 condensed matter

Symmetry Breaking and Energy Dissipation in the Mechanical Response of Amorphous Solids

This paper investigates the link between energy dissipation and symmetry breaking in amorphous solids under quasi-static strain, demonstrating through a solvable mesoscopic theory and numerical simulations that dissipation arises specifically from rotational symmetry breaking during a sharp transition between conservative and dissipative mechanical responses.

Itamar Procaccia, Tuhin Samanta2026-08-14

🔢 mathematics

Birth of a gap: Critical phenomena in 2D Coulomb gas

This paper investigates radially symmetric 2D Coulomb gas systems at inverse temperature $\beta=2$ where the equilibrium density vanishes on an interior ring, revealing a novel $n^{1/4}$ term in the partition function's large- $n$ expansion and deriving a new limiting correlation kernel distinct from the Ginibre kernel under a specific double scaling limit.

Matthias Allard, Sampad Lahiry2026-08-14

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