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 demonstrates that single-particle Green's functions in one-dimensional diffusive random quantum circuits coupled to an external bath exhibit Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) superdiffusion, characterized by wandering of the probability center and free energy fluctuations, a behavior confirmed numerically across both strong and weak noise regimes.
Inspired by prior work, this paper derives an algebraic framework to evaluate the statistical stability of minima in Gaussian random potentials against thermal and quantum activation, thereby establishing a link between activation rates and the potential's Green's function to enable the spectroscopic characterization of unknown landscapes.
This study demonstrates that two-dimensional driven-dissipative polariton condensates exhibit a tunable crossover between Edwards-Wilkinson and Kardar-Parisi-Zhang universality classes, establishing them as a versatile platform for exploring non-equilibrium scaling laws.
This paper generalizes the Continuous Maxwell Demon model from a two-state to an N-state system, deriving analytical expressions for average work and information content that confirm the validity of the second law of thermodynamics for information-to-work conversion.
This paper demonstrates that catalytically active droplets in chemically active mixtures exhibit non-reciprocal interactions leading to the formation of self-propelling, meta-stable clusters, revealing that non-local chemical interactions serve as a general mechanism for energy dissipation and out-of-equilibrium steady states in active matter.
This paper proposes a theory of weakly-monitored Tomonaga-Luttinger liquids, demonstrating that intrinsic measurement randomness induces unique universal power-law decay with logarithmic corrections and broad multifractal fluctuations in quantum critical states, a phenomenon distinct from both forced measurements and conventional critical scaling.
This paper presents a mathematically solvable toy model to describe the phase transition between normal and superfluid helium-4, demonstrating how to derive an order parameter for the superfluid state.
This paper analytically demonstrates that the area law for entanglement entropy and specific scaling properties of full counting statistics persist in a class of excited states of two-dimensional rotating fermions, with results for annular regions decomposing additively into those of their bounding discs.
This paper identifies a novel phase in two-dimensional Malthusian flocks where dynamics mimic the equilibrium XY model, revealing a critical point driven by activity-spin-wave interactions that exhibits Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless-like scaling and crossover behavior under sufficient noise.
This paper demonstrates that shear viscosities of molecular liquids calculated via the OrthoBoXY approach agree well with Green-Kubo results and are unaffected by finite-size effects down to 250 molecules, leading to a recommended strategy of simulating smaller systems for longer durations and refining block-length parameters to achieve up to a 24-fold reduction in computational cost without sacrificing accuracy.