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 generalizes open quantum system formalism to study a quantum harmonic oscillator coupled to a dissipative bath of anyon pairs, demonstrating that the anyonic statistics induce a temperature-dependent spectral density and unique relaxation dynamics most prominent at intermediate temperatures.
This study uses Monte Carlo simulations of active six-state Potts models to identify and characterize various wave modes—including spiral, target, stripe, and disordered waves—and demonstrates how their formation, coexistence, and transition dynamics are influenced by repulsion strengths and lattice configurations.
The paper proves that a quantum engine driven solely by bare measurements cannot extract work in a steady regime because, in that state, measurements become non-disturbing and fail to inject the energy required for work extraction, necessitating additional processes like feedback control or thermal contact.
This paper demonstrates that in charged colloidal crystals, electrostatic-elastic coupling causes wave-vector-dependent elastic softening that leads to a short-wavelength ultraviolet instability and local structural collapse, even while the macroscopic long-wavelength stability remains intact.
This paper demonstrates how decoherence in a color code can induce an emergent mixed-state topological order equivalent to a single toric code, using topological entanglement negativity (TEN) to characterize the transition and identify the resulting anyon structure.
This paper establishes a rigorous, model-independent criterion for finite-temperature quantum adiabaticity in driven many-body systems by deriving bounds on mixed-state fidelity that reveal a universal scaling where the threshold driving rate factorizes into zero-temperature system-size contributions and a temperature-dependent factor that transitions from unity at low temperatures to linear behavior at high temperatures.
This paper benchmarks the performance of various variational quantum ansätze in simulating the Transverse Field Ising Model across one, two, and three dimensions with up to 27 spins, evaluating their expressivity and optimization capabilities in capturing ground state properties like entanglement entropy and critical phenomena.
This paper demonstrates that existing methods fail to quantify rotational motion in complex molecular systems like supercooled liquids and introduces a new empirical method that accurately captures the full spectrum of rotational dynamics from diffusive fluids to arrested solids, thereby resolving inconsistencies in the literature.
This paper characterizes nonequilibrium phases in long-range dissipative spin systems by analyzing the statistical properties of quantum jump trajectories, demonstrating that full counting statistics and waiting-time distributions reveal distinct dynamical signatures of phase transitions that are not captured by average steady-state observables.
This paper extends the infinite-temperature spin dynamical mean-field theory (spinDMFT) to finite temperatures, enabling the calculation of imaginary-time correlations and thermodynamic quantities while demonstrating high accuracy for random-coupling and ferromagnetic systems but significant discrepancies for antiferromagnetic ones.