2356 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 introduces "free mutual information" (FMI), a new diagnostic for quantum chaos derived from free probability theory that quantifies operator spreading in the doubly exponential Hilbert space via a Coulomb gas formula and a weighted sum of higher-point OTOCs, thereby offering a sharper and more universal measure of chaos than standard four-point OTOCs.
This paper investigates both unitary and nonunitary A-D-E minimal models with topological defects on the cylinder, demonstrating that a specific coset graph encodes key boundary conformal field theory structures like fusion algebras and g-factors, while also establishing their lattice realization through integrable restricted solid-on-solid models and deriving effective central charges via dilogarithm identities from Y-system asymptotics.
This paper demonstrates that microscopically inversion-asymmetric, permeable active fluid membranes exhibit scale-dependent behavior ranging from large-scale statistical flatness with long-range orientational order to intermediate-scale roughness governed by a Kardar-Parisi-Zhang equation, ultimately revealing how active stresses and permeation flows can induce instabilities and pattern formation that destroy membrane flatness.
This paper demonstrates that the dynamics of entanglement asymmetry in periodically driven two-dimensional conformal field theories, including phenomena like the quantum Mpemba effect, can be elegantly characterized by the geometric relationship between state-preparing operator insertions, subsystems, and the fixed points of the underlying Möbius maps.
This review surveys modern self-supervised machine learning approaches for estimating the committor and other kinetic statistics from molecular dynamics data, unifying various methods under a common operator framework to overcome timescale limitations and offering guidance for practical applications and future research directions.
This paper presents an entropy measurement protocol for a tunable GaAs double quantum dot that successfully tracks the evolution from atomic-like to molecular states, quantitatively demonstrating how increasing interdot tunneling suppresses higher-energy orbital and spin configurations in agreement with a two-site Hubbard model.
This paper investigates the logarithmic singularity in the dynamical free energy of non-interacting lattice fermions released from a double-domain-wall state, revealing that the dynamical quantum phase transition arises from a topological change in the dominant complex instanton configuration, a mechanism that can be further manipulated via post-selection to induce successive transitions.
This paper introduces a generic Random Duality Theory (RDT) framework to derive closed-form upper bounds on the largest average submatrix values in the linear regime, demonstrating that a lifted RDT variant improves upon the plain version and rigorously matches established results for small submatrices.
This paper introduces a novel, pathology-free framework based on inverse limits of finite systems that rigorously implements Kenneth Wilson's original renormalization group vision, thereby overcoming decades of mathematical obstacles and opening new avenues for proving the existence of non-trivial fixed points.
This paper introduces a general method of correlation indices to uniquely quantify the total strength of both classical and quantum correlations in composite quantum and statistical systems, applicable to static and dynamic processes including nonequilibrium scenarios like trapped Bose-Einstein condensates.