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 develops a stochastic thermodynamic theory demonstrating that bullfrog hair-cell bundles function as versatile work-to-work machines capable of signal sensing, amplification, heating, and refrigeration, with some operational modes achieving energy conversion efficiencies exceeding 80%.
This paper investigates the entropic bottlenecks in a 2D apolar spin model that drive a crossover transition to a novel nematic phase characterized by unbound topological defects and itinerant para-nematic fluids, ultimately leading to a global nematic order at a lower temperature.
This study demonstrates that introducing intermittent rest with probability upon food consumption significantly extends a forager's survival time on a lattice and induces non-diffusive scaling behavior, with analytical results in one dimension corroborating numerical simulations for .
This paper investigates the symmetric Dyson exclusion process, a lattice gas with long-range Coulomb-type interactions, by mapping its stochastic generator to a free-fermion quantum chain to derive and validate a conjectured non-local hydrodynamic equation that accurately describes the system's ballistic scaling and limit shapes.
This paper establishes universal lower bounds on the precision of generic observables in non-Markovian open quantum systems by demonstrating that their fluctuations are constrained not only by entropy production but also by a newly introduced asymmetry term and a generalized activity characterizing environmental changes.
This paper extends the relationship between gradient flows and pregeodesics from dually flat manifolds to general Riemannian manifolds by utilizing non-metricity tensors to compare relaxation rates, thereby providing a geometric explanation for the universal asymmetry where warming up is faster than cooling down in Gaussian chains.
This paper establishes a direct predictive link between dielectric response and viscosity in highly polar liquids by deriving a Green-Kubo formula that reveals viscous dissipation from dipolar interactions as the dominant mechanism, thereby explaining the empirical need for two relaxation times in dielectric spectra and offering a new route for identifying solvents for electrochemical energy storage.
This paper proposes a new, uniquely defined self-similar approximation method for summing divergent virial expansions to finite densities, which avoids the ambiguities and spurious poles of Padé approximants while achieving accuracy comparable to Monte Carlo simulations without requiring fitting parameters.
This paper applies entropy production estimation tools to the macroscopic organism *A. subaru*, revealing that while entropy production provides a lower bound for energy consumption, it falls short by approximately 25 orders of magnitude, a finding supported by a survey of irreversibility methods and a novel kNN estimator.
This paper demonstrates that negative differential thermal conductivity can emerge in a linear harmonic chain solely due to the specific nature of an overdamped particle reservoir and its coupling, where the heat current vanishes at large temperature differences because the effective dissipation scales inversely with the square of the bath's temperature, leading to asymptotic decoupling.