2361 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 resource-efficient Szegedy quantum walk construction for the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm that avoids the high qubit overhead of reversible computing while maintaining the expected end-to-end quadratic speedup over classical simulations.
This paper unifies classical and quantum Mpemba effects under a single resource-theoretical framework, demonstrating that thermal relaxation and symmetry restoration are governed by analogous mechanisms involving the initial overlap with the slowest relevant dynamical modes within the resource theories of athermality and asymmetry, respectively.
This paper investigates the emergence of the thermodynamic arrow of time by training a permutation-invariant neural network on hard disk relaxation data to learn a scalar ordering of states, demonstrating that the model's learned function converges toward the structure of the Boltzmann H-functional without explicit physical constraints.
This review presents a unifying perspective on noise-assisted metastability across classical and quantum systems, connecting Lévy flight-driven escape dynamics to applications in memristive devices, driven dissipative quantum bistability, and Josephson junction-based axion detection.
This paper establishes a fundamental connection between the thermal operator product expansion (OPE) and quasinormal modes (QNM) in large- CFTs by demonstrating their overlapping convergence in the complex time plane, thereby deriving new analytic results for QNM asymptotics, numerical methods to extract low-overtone QNMs from OPE data, and sum rules that enable a new thermal bootstrap program where these two descriptions mutually constrain each other.
This paper presents a hybrid method that overcomes the rapid growth of Pauli strings in classically simulating quantum dynamics by combining accurate short-time Pauli propagation with time-extension techniques based on positivity and characteristic frequencies, thereby enabling the efficient computation of real-time correlators in interacting many-body systems beyond the traditional accessible time window.
This paper proposes a quantum algorithm that leverages the Rodeo protocol and Haar-random states to efficiently estimate the density of states for large quantum many-body systems, establishing a direct quantum analogue to the classical kernel polynomial method with inherent error suppression and minimal circuit requirements.
This paper derives a generalized Kirchhoff's law for linear time-varying Floquet media, demonstrating that thermal emissivity at a specific frequency equals a weighted sum of harmonic-resolved absorptivities in the adjoint system, thereby enabling near-maximal violations of the conventional law where strong emission occurs with negligible same-frequency absorption.
This paper demonstrates that while the resource-efficient Delta-VQE method can detect quantum phase transitions using shallow circuits, its ability to identify true critical points rather than spurious self-dual points fundamentally depends on employing ansätze that are carefully tailored to represent the competing physical phases.
This paper introduces a multiplicative event clock model that generates logarithmic aging and ultraslow transport through independent logarithmic time ratios, revealing a fundamental inequivalence between ensemble and time-averaged statistics while providing a comprehensive framework to distinguish this specific mechanism from other models that merely exhibit similar logarithmic relaxation curves.