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 develops an analytically tractable mesoscopic framework for collective motion by deriving exact Fokker-Planck equations and stochastic differential equations for polarization in a stochastic model where competing alignment and anti-alignment copying interactions suppress long-range order in the thermodynamic limit while generating nontrivial fluctuation-induced structures in finite systems.
This paper derives spectral fluctuation-dissipation-response inequalities for finite-state Markov jump processes that bound the deviation from equilibrium behavior in driven steady states using the steady-state entropy production rate and other measurable quantities, thereby providing experimentally testable thermodynamic limits on the breakdown of the fluctuation-dissipation theorem.
This paper demonstrates that while operator growth in closed quantum systems follows deterministic Hamiltonian flow in an emergent phase space, coupling to an environment transforms this dynamics into a stochastic process where dissipation induces diffusion and ultimately destroys the hyperbolic mechanism responsible for exponential complexity growth.
This paper provides a complete characterization of the phase diagram for the Ising model on a two-community stochastic block model, detailing the almost sure uniqueness/non-uniqueness phase transition, the convergence of magnetization to specific Dirac mixtures in the supercritical regime, and the distinct fluctuation behaviors (Gaussian vs. non-Gaussian) in the subcritical and critical regions.
This paper establishes the arrow of time, defined by the irreversibility of quantum measurements, as a novel local diagnostic for measurement-induced phase transitions by analytically demonstrating its nonanalytic behavior and critical exponent in a random quantum circuit model.
This paper presents an unsupervised machine learning framework that combines classical shadow tomography with principal component analysis to detect and classify diverse quantum phase transitions, including both symmetry-breaking and topological types, without requiring prior knowledge of the Hamiltonian or explicit order parameters.
This paper develops theoretical diagnostics for the breakdown of mean-field theory, demonstrating how spatial structure and finite interaction ranges qualitatively alter the effective description and renormalization-group flow.
This paper derives the all-order fluctuating hydrodynamics of the SYK lattice from its microscopic nonlinear action, explicitly embedding hydrodynamic degrees of freedom into the model and determining all corresponding transport coefficients to demonstrate how hydrodynamics emerges from a strongly coupled quantum many-body system.
This paper utilizes exact diagonalization and matrix product state techniques on a fuzzy sphere to extract conformal data for the -dimensional Wilson-Fisher CFT, identifying 32 primary operators and verifying their scaling dimensions against conformal bootstrap predictions and large charge expansion results.
This paper establishes that in a dissipative XX qubit chain, stable synchronization of edge qubits and constant asymptotic entanglement coexist if and only if the decoherence-free subspace supports exactly one single-excitation eigenstate, a condition determined by a number-theoretic function of the noise sites and chain length.