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 proposes modeling neutron behavior in nuclear reactors using directed percolation, demonstrating that this approach can identify safety hazards, such as dangerous flux levels, that traditional safety systems may fail to detect.
This paper investigates how dimension and contact geometry influence non-equilibrium behavior in particle systems driven by reservoirs, demonstrating that while symmetric simple exclusion processes in dimensions one and two exhibit three distinct coupling regimes, dimensions three and higher display only a weak coupling regime sensitive to microscopic contact structures, whereas mesoscopic contacts preserve macroscopic fluctuation theory and allow for an extended additivity principle.
This paper presents an exact solution for the nonequilibrium dynamics of a harmonically trapped self-propelled particle with anisotropic mobility, revealing that high persistence leads to a strictly sub-Gaussian steady-state distribution where the particle is displaced into high-potential regions, characterized by negative excess kurtosis and a distinct quasi-steady plateau in its mean squared displacement.
This paper introduces a stochastic first-passage modeling framework that explains how electrothermal fluctuations in SiC power MOSFETs transform the deterministic single-event burnout threshold into a probabilistic transition band, revealing noise-induced subthreshold failures and providing a statistical-physics interpretation of threshold dispersion.
This contribution presents a thermodynamic completeness test for quantum and classical Markovian dynamics and demonstrates that state trajectories alone are insufficient to reconstruct thermodynamic observables such as heat or particle currents, since distinct thermodynamic records can give rise to identical state evolutions due to hidden geometric and topological degrees of freedom.
This review outlines the key computational algorithms developed to generate ultrastable glasses, analyzing their efficiency, limitations, and physical interpretations while providing a comparative assessment of the stability achieved to offer a comprehensive understanding of the field.
This paper presents a geometric optimization framework in the plane of normalized branch dissipations to derive exact power-efficiency bounds for Carnot-like engines with power-law dissipation, reducing the problem to linear programming and yielding closed-form constraints for various dissipation exponents.
This article establishes a unified framework for thermodynamic speed limits based on generalized means of various activities, derives an infinite variety of bounds for Markov jump processes and chemical reaction networks, and analyzes the tightness of their corresponding entropy production bounds.
This paper establishes a fundamental duality between the dissipation-coherence trade-off and the thermodynamic speed limit for stochastic limit cycles in the weak-noise limit by deriving both bounds from the thermodynamic uncertainty relation using mutually dual observables, and validates these results through numerical simulations of the Rössler model and applications to stochastic chemical systems.
By randomizing the connectivity in Fock space while preserving magnetisation sector organization in a modified quantum East model, the authors demonstrate that a transition between delocalised and localised phases persists, indicating that the graph structure of Fock space, rather than geometric locality, is the essential ingredient for many-body localisation in East-type constrained models.