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 proposes a necessary and sufficient condition for the ubiquity of stationary noise, derived from an analytical study of a diffusion equation and fluid turbulence scaling, which states that the noise must be characterized by two distinct frequency bounds and the absence of any other constant parameters within that range.
This paper numerically verifies that the Brownian Castle interface growth model belongs to a new universality class characterized by modified Family-Vicsek scaling with specific growth and roughness exponents, alongside non-Gaussian height distributions and Cauchy-Lorentz distributed height changes.
This paper establishes a field-theoretic framework for temporal entanglement entropy in 2D conformal field theories via analytic continuation of twist correlators, which holographically identifies boundary-anchored complex geodesics as the relevant bulk saddles and confirms a complex extremal surface prescription that accurately reproduces field theory results across various excited states and quenches while uniquely determining the quantized imaginary part of the entropy.
This paper demonstrates that the macroscopic fluctuation theory for single-file diffusion, modeled as a gas of extended Brownian hard rods, is exactly solvable via a canonical transformation, enabling the explicit computation of large-deviation statistics for tracer position and integrated current in both continuum and lattice exclusion models.
This paper presents a statistical mechanical framework and equations of state, guided by computer simulations, to construct the full phase diagram of active Brownian spheres, successfully predicting how activity shifts the crystallization transition and reproducing key coexistence features like the triple point.
This paper introduces a generalized Gibbs-Duhem framework that unifies classical thermodynamics with Newtonian mechanics by incorporating kinetic effects, leading to a new density evolution equation for fluid-fluid interfaces that naturally recovers fundamental physical laws such as the speed of sound, Bernoulli's law, and the van der Waals equation of state.
This paper investigates how chirality in active particles influences phase separation, revealing that while it can induce bulk or microphase separation and traveling interfacial waves without altering standard coarsening laws, it also drives the breakup of elongated droplets even in the absence of fluid flows.
This paper proposes a geometric framework for nonequilibrium response by identifying topologically determined optimally sensitive models that serve as building blocks, conjecturing that all responses are convex combinations of these models to systematically characterize sensitivity limits and optimal kinetic schemes.
This paper resolves the tension between linear stability and thermodynamic heating in periodically driven spin systems by demonstrating that perturbations around stable many-body periodic orbits exhibit an emergent quasiparticle band structure, enabling a "doubly tunable" prethermal regime whose lifetime is controlled by engineering the dispersion and momentum distribution of these modes.
This paper introduces a spatial realization of measurement-induced phase transitions in a single monitored Clifford chain by imposing a deterministic measurement gradient, which creates a steady state with coexisting entanglement phases and enables the direct extraction of critical exponents through spatial scaling without Kibble-Zurek dynamics.