1537 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 demonstrates that thermal fluctuations coupled with finite extensibility fundamentally alter the Euler buckling instability of semiflexible polymers, leading to a new critical regime where the critical compressional strain increases with system size and is governed by a distinct fixed point with unique critical exponents.
This paper presents an analytic nonlinear theory of shear banding in athermally sheared amorphous solids, deriving equations that account for plastic-induced dipole screening to explain the instability mechanism, predict shear band width, and determine the critical stress threshold for failure.
This paper analytically derives the attenuation constant for Drude and Drude-Sommerfeld metals with high carrier concentrations, revealing critical behavior in optical properties like group velocity and dielectric constant near the plasma frequency and providing associated critical exponents and quantum corrections.
This paper proposes a free-energy framework to distinguish between capability elicitation, which reweights existing behaviors within a model's accessible support, and capability creation, which expands that support through mechanisms like search or tool use, arguing that this distinction is more critical than the traditional SFT versus RL dichotomy in post-training.
This paper investigates diffusion with stochastic resetting on a ring, demonstrating that the optimal resetting rate for minimizing mean first-passage time to an absorbing target can undergo abrupt or continuous transitions exhibiting mirror symmetry, depending on the configuration of multiple resetting sites.
This paper establishes the mathematical conditions for the existence and uniqueness of solutions when optimizing the nonadditive entropy under a generalized energy constraint, proving that only specific constraint forms yield -exponential distributions while demonstrating that the linear constraint case () preserves thermodynamic laws and effectively models complex systems ranging from many-body Hamiltonians to edge-of-chaos dynamics.
This paper introduces CFT Design, a general framework based on Caliber Force Theory that optimizes nonequilibrium flow networks in biomolecular machines by addressing cost-benefit tradeoffs and misflows to improve performance in applications such as molecular motors, kinetic proofreaders, and enzyme inhibitors.
This paper establishes an exact mapping between finite-temperature homological quantum codes and a -dimensional spacetime polymer gas with topological charges, utilizing this reformulation to derive rigorous low-temperature stability criteria, exact higher-form dualities, and connections to the plaquette random-cluster model.
This paper demonstrates that a shallow restricted Boltzmann machine, when used as a variational ansatz in variational Monte Carlo simulations, successfully reproduces the main adiabatic phase structure and captures symmetry-broken insulating configurations of the one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard chain in the hard-core limit at half filling.
This paper introduces Clifford ergotropy as the energy extractable via Clifford operations, establishing universal upper bounds that decrease with magic resources and demonstrating their significance for both small-scale control landscapes and many-body thermodynamic laws.