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 demonstrates that local dissipation fundamentally alters the one-dimensional Mott transition by splitting it and inducing novel critical behavior with continuously varying exponents for bath exponents , a finding quantitatively supported by Monte Carlo simulations.
This paper introduces a Monte Carlo strategy to directly estimate partition function ratios between distinct global sectors, applying it to the critical 3D Ising model to determine the symmetry-twisted thermodynamic Casimir difference and extract CFT compactification data without relying on lattice derivatives or bulk subtractions.
This paper investigates work statistics in monitored transverse-field Ising chains under quantum-jump and quench dynamics, demonstrating that increasing detection events or continuous observation drives the work distribution from a comb-like structure toward Gaussian behavior while revealing distinct linear and sublinear growth regimes for average work depending on the causal connectivity of successive jumps.
This paper demonstrates that while topological entanglement entropy remains quantized in the finite-temperature 3D toric code despite symmetry breaking, it fails to be a robust mixed-state invariant under quasi-local channels, necessitating the introduction of the decoded Wilson-loop correlation as a new, stable topological invariant to distinguish the topological phase from a trivial one.
This paper demonstrates that analyzing single-cell-level probability distributions and statistical relationships of physiological quantities, such as birth and division sizes, enables the differentiation of both cell-division mechanisms (Timer, Sizer, Adder) and growth paradigms (linear, exponential), even in the presence of stochasticity, asymmetric partitioning, and lineage correlations, as validated by experimental data.
This paper demonstrates that a double-occupancy cell fluid model with Curie-Weiss interaction, which is isomorphic to the Blume-Capel model on a complete graph, exhibits rich thermodynamic phase behavior—including single and double critical points, tricriticality, triple points, and gas-liquid and liquid-liquid coexistence—driven by the competition between local repulsion and global attraction.
This paper establishes a universal scaling theory for short-imaginary-time critical dynamics in quantum systems with boundaries, revealing distinct decay laws and novel critical exponents that depend on boundary universality classes and challenge conventional quantum-classical mapping predictions.
This paper re-examines the Galam Majority Model with contrarian agents from a statistical-mechanics perspective, demonstrating that it represents an iterated mean-field dynamics that violates detailed balance and constitutes a genuine nonequilibrium steady state rather than a thermal equilibrium process.
This paper argues that the transition from barren plateaus to trainable landscapes in monitored hybrid variational quantum circuits constitutes a distinct universal measurement-induced landscape transition (MILT) rather than the measurement-induced phase transition, characterized by the emergence of coding barren plateaus where local cost functions retain information about parameters despite vanishing gradients.
This paper investigates the emergent hydrodynamics of a non-reciprocal classical Heisenberg spin chain, demonstrating that despite the absence of energy and magnetization conservation, the system exhibits thermalization, diffusive spreading of alternative local conservation laws, and distinct decorrelation fronts.