2358 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 investigates the steady-state phase transitions in a one-dimensional hybrid contact process, revealing both continuous and discontinuous transitions through mean-field approximations and the coherent anomaly method, which characterizes the system's nonclassical scaling behavior.
This paper extends the time-dependent numerical renormalization group (TDNRG) method to calculate the quantum work distribution function for strongly coupled many-body open systems, revealing non-perturbative power-law threshold behavior and universal scaling collapse driven by the Anderson orthogonality catastrophe.
This paper demonstrates that a classical harmonic oscillator coupled to a non-Markovian thermal bath with a finite frequency cutoff can undergo a transition from ergodic thermal equilibrium to nonergodic cyclostationary states as its frequency increases, a phenomenon characterized as a second-order phase transition.
This paper demonstrates that true multivariable discrete distributions, including Ising models, can be rigorously learned from metastable samples by leveraging the observation that their single-variable conditional probabilities remain close to the stationary distribution despite global divergence, thereby enabling effective parameter and structure recovery via conditional-likelihood estimation.
By combining tensor network methods and Monte Carlo simulations on a spatially modulated two-dimensional XY model, this study reveals a non-monotonic "superfluid dome" in the critical temperature caused by the effective pinning of vortices in modulation valleys, offering new insights into the interplay between superconductivity and charge density waves.
This paper introduces a generalized many-body entanglement swapping protocol that enables non-signaling parties to share high-fidelity many-body states across arbitrary networks of intermediate nodes without postselection, offering significant advancements for fault-tolerant distributed quantum computing.
This paper introduces ML-PWS, a method that combines machine learning with Path Weight Sampling to estimate a rigorous lower bound on information transmission rates from experimental time-series data without requiring a prior stochastic model.
This study establishes a global phase diagram for two-dimensional dirty hyperbolic Dirac liquids, demonstrating that negative spatial curvature stabilizes massless Dirac excitations against weak disorder before driving the system through a continuous transition into a metallic state and finally into an Anderson insulator at strong disorder.
This paper identifies and characterizes a novel "information critical phase" in decohered toric codes (for ), where diverging Markov length and enhanced symmetry lead to a gapless mixed-state phase that preserves a finite fraction of logical information, thereby extending the paradigm of quantum memory beyond conventional gapped topological phases.
This paper demonstrates that active run-and-tumble particles in a double-well potential exhibit strong ergodicity breaking above a critical barrier height due to initial-condition-dependent trapping, while below this threshold they restore ergodicity with a unique stationary distribution and a barrier crossing time that diverges according to a Vogel-Fulcher-Tammann-like law with an anomalous exponent of , violating the standard Kramers-Arrhenius behavior.