2391 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 a minimal frustrated Vicsek–Kuramoto active-particle model with Sakaguchi-type phase lags realizes a non-Hermitian Chern bulk-boundary correspondence, where linear hydrodynamic instabilities select a topologically nontrivial spectrum with Chern numbers that drives robust one-way boundary flows saturated by nonlinear particle dynamics.
This paper introduces "minimal normalizing flows" (MNFs), a computationally efficient, physically informed bijective mapping strategy that significantly accelerates chemical potential and free energy calculations in molecular simulations by overcoming the training complexity and limited sampling improvements of traditional normalizing flows.
This study demonstrates that the mechanical critical pressure of the isoreticular RHO zeolite family can be exponentially tuned from approximately 0.94 GPa to below 0.03 GPa by increasing the isoreticular order, revealing that the framework's reversible phase-transition "valve" behavior is a generic property of the hierarchy that becomes significantly softer and more stimuli-responsive in larger members.
This paper establishes a direct link between Onsager symmetry, duality defects, and quantum integrability in the XXZ spin chain at roots of unity by constructing a lattice realization of the Onsager algebra and its duality automorphism via a non-Abelian algebra of transfer matrices, thereby demonstrating that non-Abelian integrability naturally gives rise to categorical dualities and topological defect lines.
This paper presents an exact lattice formulation using influence functionals and a commuting linked-cluster hierarchy to analytically demonstrate how highly non-Gaussian correlations in a two-leg hard-core ladder are systematically suppressed under coarse-graining, thereby rigorously deriving the emergence of Gaussian entanglement theory from microscopic lattice dynamics.
This paper demonstrates that geometric asymmetry in the propulsion directions of two spring-coupled self-propelled robots generates net torques leading to diverse collective dynamics, including run-and-tumble, circular, and spinning motions, thereby bridging artificial active systems with biological microswimmers.
This paper presents a thermodynamic-limit framework for Dicke models with interacting matter, demonstrating that superradiant phase transitions arise as folds of a single self-consistent equation of state rather than crossings of disjoint phases, and applies this exact formalism to map the diverse phase diagrams of various quantum magnets including Ising, Rydberg-blockade, and Heisenberg chains.
This paper demonstrates that time-delayed pairwise coupling in Kuramoto oscillators can be effectively recast as higher-order three-body interactions, revealing that these emergent interactions account for key dynamical features such as bistability and synchronization transitions.
This paper demonstrates a robust, dissipative protocol for preparing the ground state of a transverse-field Ising spin chain with up to 19 spins on a trapped-ion quantum computer, showing monotonic fidelity improvement and convergence to low-energy states despite hardware noise, with results matching noiseless simulations after zero-noise extrapolation.
This paper presents an improved algorithm for precisely determining the microstructural scaling exponent of two-phase media by incorporating higher-order correction terms and analyticity properties into the long-time asymptotics of diffusion spreadability, while also introducing a two-point Padé approximant to model the spreadability behavior across all time scales.