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.
By generalizing models of protracted transients, this study identifies a novel mechanism for self-organized hyperuniformity in population dynamics where resource-mediated competition drives the system to a critical state with divergent interaction ranges, despite the absence of conservation laws.
This paper demonstrates that coupling an order parameter nonreciprocally to a conserved diffusing density breaks the robustness of Ising universality below four dimensions, driving the system to a novel non-equilibrium fixed point characterized by long-range multiplicative noise, split scaling exponents, and strong finite-size corrections.
This paper establishes that the Brownian Ising Model, where a order parameter couples to a passive conserved density, undergoes a non-equilibrium phase transition to a unique universality class distinct from the equilibrium Ising model, characterized by fluctuation-dissipation theorem violation, negative anomalous dimensions, and exact scaling relations derived from emergent symmetries.
This paper establishes a universal parabolic power-efficiency trade-off in battery discharging and derives an optimal multistage constant-current schedule that minimizes dissipation by balancing real-time load demands against a global deadline.
This paper develops a tractable variance approximation for Markovian epidemics on configuration-model networks by combining Gleeson's approximate master equation with a van Kampen system-size expansion, yielding a closed-form diffusion matrix that accurately predicts fluctuations around the mean-field trajectory across various network topologies.
This paper establishes a continuous thermalization hierarchy in quantum many-body systems by demonstrating that the dimension of irreducible representations () of bond algebras quantitatively controls eigenstate entanglement entropy, thereby interpolating between nonthermal scars and ergodic states through the concept of irreducible degrees of freedom.
This paper demonstrates that calculating entropy production from short molecular dynamics trajectories provides a practical method for estimating free-energy barriers and identifying optimal reaction coordinates, effectively linking the second law of thermodynamics with the kinetics of activated processes in complex systems.
Using fully resolved nematohydrodynamic simulations, this study demonstrates that a passive nematic droplet in two-dimensional extensile active turbulence exhibits temporal intermittency and scale-free burst statistics in its deformation, revealing a hierarchy where interfacial restoring forces filter active stress fluctuations to produce distinct, bursty dynamics compared to the more intermittent translational and stress fluctuations.
This paper demonstrates that strong coupling to an infrared-singular reservoir transforms the work distribution of a sudden bias inversion in the spin-boson model from a quasiparticle threshold into a many-body edge via boundary orthogonality, revealing a finite-energy crossover where the cumulative-continuum exponent exceeds the elastic-overlap exponent and significantly impacts the sampling cost of Jarzynski-type averages.
This paper solves the inverse problem in classical density functional theory by deriving explicit analytical and numerical expressions for wall potentials that generate perfectly flat equilibrium density profiles in planar, spherical, and cylindrical geometries for both hard-sphere and Lennard-Jones fluids within Rosenfeld's fundamental measure theory.