2377 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 derives a closed-form analytical expression for the full distribution of eccentricities in random regular graphs, revealing non-trivial variations in node eccentricities despite uniform degrees and providing precise formulas for the mean, mode, and variance that serve as benchmarks for analyzing large sparse networks.
This paper proposes an experimentally motivated model of a polymer-bead system where inertia enables a tunable Mpemba effect, as higher initial temperatures or weaker forces allow the bead to accumulate sufficient kinetic energy to rapidly cross a relaxation-slowing plateau during denaturation.
This paper introduces Additive Particle (AP) theory, an approximation method that models electrons as string polymers with added virtual particles to avoid the sign problem in many-fermion path integral approaches, successfully reproducing free electron properties at weak electrostatic interactions while acknowledging deviations at stronger interactions.
This paper demonstrates that the three-dimensional fermionic toric code, through its anomalous 2-form symmetry, sustains long-range entanglement and a unique quantum topological order at finite temperatures, thereby establishing the existence of equilibrium phases of matter that only emerge at nonzero temperatures.
This study proposes a Factorization Machine with Quadratic-Optimization Annealing (FMQA) framework for RNA inverse folding and demonstrates that specific nucleotide-to-integer assignments combined with domain-wall encoding significantly enhance solution quality by promoting thermodynamically stable structures with enriched guanine and cytosine in stem regions.
This paper introduces "half dualization," a general lattice construction that generates non-invertible duality defects by performing duality transformations in subregions of spacetime, and demonstrates its application to particle-vortex duality in the Villainized XY model and its evolution into invertible defects within gauged systems.
This paper proposes and validates a practical protocol for emulating fully-connected transverse interaction catalysts in quantum annealing using self-consistent transverse fields and measurements, offering a viable alternative for near-term quantum devices to mitigate exponentially small gaps and first-order phase transitions.
This paper derives exact expressions for collective first-passage statistics of trail-interacting walkers, revealing that splitting probabilities remain invariant whether walkers move simultaneously or sequentially, provided their response to the shared environmental memory is saturating.
This paper establishes a unified framework for analyzing coupled stochastic systems by characterizing the factorization of path-space conditional laws through log-likelihoods, Girsanov transformations, and information-theoretic measures, thereby linking boundary screening, stochastic control, and the thermodynamic value of mutual information.
This study numerically demonstrates that a Fermi--Pasta--Ulam system cooled at a rate falls out of equilibrium below a stochastic threshold, retaining a residual energy at zero temperature that scales as with system size and cooling rate .