1572 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 predicts and verifies the existence of Quantum Many-Body Scars in spin-1 Quantum Link Models by demonstrating an approximate spectrum-generating algebra in a dualized constrained spin chain, thereby providing diagnostic observables to guide quantum simulations of non-equilibrium gauge theories.
This paper introduces a minimal model of interacting populations with coupled spatial and internal-state coordinates, demonstrating that density-dependent mobility in internal-state coordinates alone can drive a transition from arrested aggregates to boundary-led peeling and migration, thereby offering a unified framework for understanding collective spatial reorganization in biological systems.
This study reveals that passive particles immersed in a chiral active bath can spontaneously form rotating clusters within a specific regime of size ratio and packing fraction, driven by a coherent net torque and structural order, while chirality heterogeneity disrupts this emergent rotational coherence.
This paper analyzes bosonic bound states in systems strongly coupled to gapped reservoirs by demonstrating that an exactly solvable model's results can be reproduced via a weak-coupling treatment of a supersystem with parallel reaction coordinates, revealing that while weak interactions induce finite lifetimes, increasing the system-reservoir coupling can enhance stability.
This paper identifies and corrects significant errors in the novel method proposed by Brückner et al. for inferring the dynamics of underdamped stochastic systems in the presence of measurement noise.
This paper establishes the Random Energy Model (REM) universality for a sequence of linear random Hamiltonians by demonstrating that, as the system size grows, the energy levels of an exponentially large number of randomly sampled configurations converge to a Poisson point process with exponential intensity, thereby characterizing fluctuations and improving upon previous results on REM universality by dilution.
This paper derives stochastic differential equations for the coupled system of eigenvalues and eigenvector-overlaps in non-Hermitian matrix-valued Brownian motion, establishes their scale-transformation invariance, and utilizes a regularized Fuglede-Kadison determinant to formulate stochastic partial differential equations linking the time-dependent eigenvalue point process to the logarithmic variations of the determinant.
This paper revisits a nonlinear energy-conservation mechanism proposed to suppress macroscopic superpositions, deriving necessary commutation relations to validate spatial confinement terms while demonstrating that analogous terms for non-pure spin models fail these constraints, and concludes by presenting a toy model of the resulting energy barrier alongside a comparison with collapse models.
This paper theoretically demonstrates that non-equilibrium hyperuniform fluids with center-of-mass conservation exhibit a distinct liquid-gas criticality class characterized by finite density fluctuations, a reduced upper critical dimension of 2, and a scale-dependent effective temperature, thereby fundamentally violating the conventional Ising universality class and fluctuation-dissipation relations.
This paper demonstrates that in fully connected long-range quantum systems, integrability exhibits a dichotomy of robustness or extreme fragility depending on perturbation type, where only extensive two-body perturbations trigger chaos at infinitesimal strength, leading to a fragmented realization of the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis within symmetry-defined energy bands.