🔬 Category

cond-mat.stat-mech

2392 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.

⚛️ quantum physics

A single-electron double quantum dot with Rashba spin-orbit interaction as a working substance for heat machines

This paper investigates a single-electron double quantum dot with Rashba spin-orbit interaction as the working substance of a quantum Otto machine, demonstrating how the Rashba coupling serves as a control parameter to switch between heat-engine, refrigerator, heater, and accelerator regimes while revealing a fundamental trade-off between maximum efficiency and work output.

Ivan Romualdo de Oliveira, Vinícius N. A. Lula-Rocha, Moises Rojas2026-06-23
🔬 condensed matter

Scalable Physics-Inspired Transformers for Spin Glasses

This paper introduces a scalable, physics-inspired transformer with interpretable sparse attention and specialized positional embeddings that achieves up to a 100-fold speedup over existing variational autoregressive networks, enabling efficient sampling of Boltzmann distributions and accurate resolution of thermodynamic properties for large-scale frustrated spin-glass systems on a single GPU.

Lu Zhong, Wenli Duan, Jing Liu, Pan Zhang, Ying Tang2026-06-23
🌀 nonlinear sciences

Deviance from a pink noise regime in the temporal organization of semantic relations in psychosis

This study demonstrates that individuals with psychosis exhibit abnormally strong long-range temporal correlations in their semantic speech patterns, deviating from the typical "pink noise" regime toward excessive persistence, which parallels known departures from criticality in brain function associated with the disorder.

Paola Moreno Ancalmo, Emre Bora, Rieke Roxanne Mülfarth, Svenja Seuffert, Tilo Kircher, Frederike Stein, Philipp Homan (…)2026-06-23
🔢 mathematics

Skewness tunes the small-drift record rate of random walks and Lévy flights

This paper derives an exact scaling law for the record rate of random walks and Lévy flights with small positive drift, showing that the rate vanishes as a power of the drift determined by the step distribution's skewness and stability index, a result obtained via a unified Mellin transform approach that also recovers known results for expected maximums in queueing and diffusion theory.

José Ricardo G. Mendonça2026-06-23
⚛️ lattice

Emergent Andreev Reflection from a Lattice Duality Defect

This paper demonstrates that a purely lattice duality defect in a Majorana representation of the transverse-field Ising chain induces an emergent Andreev-like boundary condition by implementing a chiral fermion-parity flip, thereby providing a microscopic realization of the Emery–Kivelson boundary, Maldacena–Ludwig monopole scattering, and an axial U(1)AU(1)_A-symmetric charge-flip interface.

Atsushi Ueda, Tokiro Numasawa, Boris De Vos, Masataka Watanabe2026-06-23
🧬 biology

Inheritance Entropy: A Model-Independent Method to Probe the Hereditary Structure of Cell Lineage Trees

This paper introduces a model-independent method called "Inheritance Entropy" to demonstrate that heterogeneity in human bone marrow stromal cell colonies arises from heritable, non-genetic factors regulating cell-cycle exit, as evidenced by significantly lower entropy values in observed clonal lineage trees compared to non-hereditary models.

Alessandro Allegrezza, Riccardo Beschi, Domenico Caudo, Andrea Cavagna, Alessandro Corsi, Antonio Culla, Samantha Donsan (…)2026-06-19
⚛️ quantum physics

Generating function and Bloch representation for quantum Fisher tensor

This paper establishes the Uhlmann relative amplitude as a generating function for the quantum Fisher tensor, derives its general Bloch representation to facilitate calculations of geometric properties like the mean Uhlmann curvature, and demonstrates the formalism on spin canonical ensembles to reveal a constant Ricci scalar and vacuum Einstein equation on the magnetic field manifold.

Felipe P. Abreu, Wei Chen2026-06-19
🔢 mathematics

Matrix-product state skeletons in Onsager-integrable quantum chains

This paper extends the concept of dense Matrix-product state (MPS) skeletons from free-fermion models to interacting NN-state Onsager-integrable chiral clock chains by constructing MPS that form a dense skeleton in gapped regions and serve as exact eigenstates in specific spectral sectors, thereby enabling closed-form calculations of disorder parameters and revealing new excited states through the Onsager algebra.

Imogen Camp, Nick G. Jones2026-06-19
🔬 condensed matter

Coupling between Phase Separation and Geometry on a Closed Elastic Curve: Free Energy Minimization and Dynamics

This paper investigates the coupled free energy and dynamics of a closed elastic filament with a phase-separating concentration field, revealing analytically and numerically that the closure constraint qualitatively alters the energy landscape to support metastable and stable multi-domain morphologies that differ significantly from those of rigid or open filaments.

Hanchun Wang, Ronojoy Adhikari, Michael E. Cates2026-06-19