1558 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 introduces a mesoscopic partition function based on combined spatial and phase-space coarse-graining that recovers the standard canonical limit and establishes a unified framework linking the factorization of this function to the extensivity of free energy, with deviations quantified by inter-cell correlations and mutual information.
This paper presents a rigorous model of a one-dimensional magnetic crystal to demonstrate how an external magnetic field can control electromagnetic wave propagation by calculating the system's dispersion relation.
This paper analyzes one-dimensional theory on a lattice to demonstrate that Gaussian models fail primarily due to structured dependencies between Fourier modes rather than marginal non-Gaussianity, leading to the identification of three distinct regimes and a simple diagnostic criterion for determining when more expressive nonlinear models are necessary.
This paper develops a field-theoretic loop expansion for homopolymer systems by mapping inverse polymer density to the Planck constant, demonstrating that the resulting next-to-leading-order correction (RPA+) qualitatively improves the prediction of dilute-phase coexistence densities compared to the standard random phase approximation.
Using an exact microscopic theory for two soft run-and-tumble particles, this paper demonstrates that while increasing repulsion initially leads to effective repulsion, the emergence of Motility-Induced Phase Separation (MIPS) is driven by effective attraction appearing only as a higher-order contribution to the renormalized pair potential.
This paper provides a thorough microscopic theory for soft run-and-tumble particles, deriving exact effective interaction vertices through iterative perturbation expansions to fully characterize their stationary state and emergent effective attraction despite purely repulsive forces.
This paper presents a DNA-mediated design for the self-assembly of binary colloidal suspensions that enables precise control over both the number of layers and the compositional order of the resulting crystallites by leveraging equilibrium principles for thickness and engineered reaction kinetics for particle arrangement.
This paper establishes a controlled theoretical framework mapping collective intermolecular electronic correlations in optical cavities to the solvable spherical Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model, revealing two novel entropy-driven phases (paracorrelated and spin-glass) that emerge from cavity-mediated electron correlations.
Using ballistic macroscopic fluctuation theory, this paper demonstrates that superdiffusive spin transport in the critical regime of the spin-1/2 XXZ chain is driven by long-range correlations scaling as , while also establishing that spin conductivity is proportional to at high temperatures with a divergent proportionality constant under specific magnetization conditions.
This paper extends the branching Brownian motion model to higher-order asexual reproduction, revealing that increasing reproduction order fundamentally alters invasion dynamics by eliminating standard traveling fronts and introducing critical behaviors like localized "invasion bullets," thereby suggesting that the prevalence of binary reproduction in nature stems from these inherent constraints on population spread.