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 demonstrates that fractional space-time epidemic dynamics emerge naturally from first principles by mapping stochastic contagion to a non-equilibrium quantum field theory, where integrating out host vacuum fluctuations generates anomalous scaling that transforms the effective reproductive number into a spectral dispersion relation capable of modeling Lévy flight super-spreading and temporal avalanches.
This study demonstrates that hydrated DNA under magnetic excitation exhibits discrete, topologically quantized macroscopic attractor states characterized by telegraph-switching polarization voltages, revealing how dissipative dynamics constrained by phase topology can induce macroscopic quantization in classical systems at ambient conditions.
This paper demonstrates that deforming the spin-1 Babujian-Takhtajan chain with its third conserved charge, which acts as a dressed scalar-chirality operator, induces a quantum phase transition into a gapless, chiral current-carrying state described by a conformal field theory, a phenomenon verified through thermodynamic Bethe ansatz and DMRG simulations.
This paper presents an exact analytical framework based on the Fokker-Planck equation to characterize the transient and steady-state dynamics of chiral active Brownian particles in harmonic traps, revealing that dimensionality critically dictates the behavior of excess kurtosis, which exhibits damped oscillatory crossovers in two dimensions but remains negative in three dimensions.
This paper proposes two generalized Caldeira-Leggett models to describe thermophoresis in quantum Brownian particles driven by thermal gradients, thereby addressing a previously open problem in the field.
This paper investigates the conjecture that non-unitary conformal minimal models arise from complex scalar field theories by testing long-range deformations, finding inconsistencies for but confirming that the long-range Lee-Yang model () behaves analogously to the long-range Ising model.
This paper introduces continuum free-energy computing, a new paradigm that encodes problems in programmable free-energy functionals and solves them via intrinsic relaxational dynamics, proposing ion-patterned FeRh as a physical realization where antiferromagnetic-ferromagnetic interface motion drives the computation.
This paper introduces a rejection-free kinetic Monte Carlo framework to demonstrate that allowing competing dynamical channels to coevolve with a driven antiferromagnetic Ising model fundamentally alters its nonequilibrium phase diagram and critical properties, stabilizing order in regimes where single-dynamics descriptions would predict its destruction.
This paper identifies two minimal physical mechanisms—geometric steric constraints and periodic "sticker" interactions—that stabilize helical conformations in chiral polymer condensates, explaining why helices are non-generic outcomes of polymer collapse and providing analytical predictions for their structural parameters.
This paper presents a non-equilibrium thermodynamic framework using dynamical mean field theory to derive an exact expression for the entropy production rate in nonlinear network systems subject to fluctuating interactions modeled as uncorrelated colored noise, thereby quantifying how disorder strength and correlation time influence system behavior.