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 establishes an Active Young-Dupré equation that explains how self-organized currents and drag forces, rather than simple surface tension balances, stabilize partial wetting and dictate droplet morphology in active systems, leading to unique phenomena like the expulsion of objects from liquid phases.
This paper introduces VQCount, a variational quantum algorithm based on the quantum alternating operator ansatz that achieves exponential improvements in sample efficiency for approximate counting of #P-hard problems by leveraging a tradeoff between solution probability and sampling uniformity.
This paper introduces parallel-sequential (PS) circuits as a versatile quantum circuit family that balances entanglement and correlation range, demonstrating their superior efficiency in preparing one-dimensional ground states, robustness against noise, and enhanced trainability compared to existing architectures.
This paper proposes a non-integer-dimensional model for anisotropic solids using q-deformed derivatives inspired by Tsallis statistics to derive thermodynamic properties that accurately match experimental data while linking the deformation parameter to microscopic disorder and memory effects.
This paper demonstrates that the alpha-relaxation dynamics of various glass-formers across different temperature regimes can be universally described by a two-parameter model derived from the two-state, two-scale (TS2) theory, which connects to the Hall-Wolynes elastic relaxation framework.
This paper investigates the thermodynamic costs of bit erasure in DRAM and SRAM models, revealing that DRAM is most energy-efficient in the quasistatic limit while SRAM achieves optimal efficiency in finite time, and demonstrates a robust optimization framework using mean field theory and automatic differentiation to derive protocols compatible with electrical engineering insights.
This study investigates the liquid-liquid phase separation in the supercooled Kob-Andersen model using a weighted coordination number order parameter to reconstruct binodal lines and verify local equilibrium, ultimately modeling the transition to the glass transition region and its super-Arrhenius temperature-dependent viscosity through a Markov Network Model.
This paper refutes a recent claim that the Second Law of thermodynamics fails to guarantee stability in third-order extended heat conduction, demonstrating instead that standard thermodynamic conditions (concave entropy and non-negative entropy production) are sufficient to ensure linear stability by proving that the dispersion polynomial's structure prevents positive real roots.
This paper demonstrates that genuine quantum scars, rooted in unstable periodic orbits, persist in periodically driven (Floquet) chaotic many-body systems and can even be enhanced or newly induced by the drive, offering a tunable platform to control scarring behavior against thermalization.
This paper demonstrates that utilizing geometric frustration and magnetic flux to induce flat-band formation and Aharonov-Bohm caging in a bosonic rhombi-chain lattice significantly enhances the work output and efficiency of quantum Otto cycles by suppressing heat release, while offering broader work extraction for Stirling cycles, thereby establishing spectral engineering as a viable strategy for optimizing bosonic quantum thermal machines.