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 a minimal lattice model of collective search-and-capture, revealing that the assignment policy used to match walkers to targets can influence the total completion time more significantly than the walkers' persistence, with maximum-cardinality matching offering substantial speedups over greedy policies, particularly at moderate to large search radii.
This paper establishes a universal "control budget" for first-passage kinetics in finite Markov chains, demonstrating that the logarithmic sensitivities of the mean completion time to individual transition rates are bounded by unity and sum to -1, thereby imposing a fundamental trade-off where accelerating the process via some transitions necessitates compensatory slowing elsewhere.
This paper challenges recent claims that the Szilard engine is non-functional by applying the van der Waals surface energy principle to demonstrate that the engine can indeed operate effectively under defined conditions with a simplified piston.
This paper presents a machine learning-assisted thermodynamic analysis of a quantum Szilard engine using a single particle, comparing its information-processing costs and operational mechanisms to the classical counterpart to elucidate thermodynamic trade-offs and the role of partition insertion in the quantum regime.
This paper honors Professor K. Alex Muller by recounting the author's scientific collaboration with him and presenting the conclusion that cubic-to-trigonal and cubic-to-tetragonal transitions in perovskites belong to distinct universality classes, characterized respectively by tetracritical and bicritical phase diagrams that asymptotically evolve into a triple point.
Using exact enumeration on the anisotropic square lattice Ising model with quenched surface disorder in cylinder geometry, the study demonstrates that while such disorder is irrelevant in two dimensions, it induces logarithmic corrections to the surface free energy and critical Casimir properties.
Through computer simulations and an elasto-plastic model, this study demonstrates that the stochasticity of fatigue failure times in sheared glasses is an intrinsic property of the failure process, characterized by a distribution where the standard deviation of logarithmic failure times scales with the mean and sharpens as system size increases toward the thermodynamic limit.
This paper constructs reversible holographic heat engines for Schwarzschild black holes in asymptotically flat spacetime by treating the thermodynamics of a finite spherical cavity as the working substance, deriving and comparing the exact efficiencies of various engine cycles to reveal how they approach the Carnot limit in the high-temperature regime.
This paper employs exact Bethe Ansatz and thermodynamic Bethe Ansatz methods to study a -symmetric non-Hermitian multichannel Kondo model, revealing four distinct impurity phases and demonstrating that while the Kondo phase obeys a generalized -theorem, the zero-mode and local-moment phases exhibit non-monotonic impurity entropy flow that violates RG irreversibility despite maintaining a real spectrum and CFT-consistent defect entropies.
This paper investigates the entanglement entropy of fermions in a solvable large- 1D strange metal model, demonstrating that the crossover from thermal to entanglement entropy follows a universal scaling law described by a standard conformal field theory formula with an effective central charge significantly enhanced by strong interactions.