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.
This paper proposes a graph-theoretic framework for urban Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) that identifies critical coverage thresholds, demonstrating that even low-density networks can enable earthquake early warning and activity tracking while ensuring privacy, with full city-scale monitoring and individual tracking only achievable beyond a 51.6% coverage percolation threshold.
This paper establishes bounds on the mixing times for the facilitated simple exclusion process on segments and circles, demonstrating that the symmetric variant exhibits pre-cutoff with mixing times of order while the asymmetric variant can display exponentially slow convergence to ergodic components depending on initial conditions, all proven via novel lattice path couplings.
This paper introduces polynomial-depth duality transformations to efficiently prepare Gibbs states for quantum Hamiltonians, such as the 2D toric code, by mapping them to dual classical systems like Ising chains while preserving key mixing properties under Lindbladian dynamics.
This paper establishes an entropic framework for analyzing spontaneous symmetry breaking in equivariant dynamical systems, distinguishing between local mechanisms characterized by increased Shannon entropy and critical slowing down, and global mechanisms where entropy changes depend on the redistribution of probability across symmetry-related sectors.
This paper investigates the collective dynamics of particles diffusing outside a spherical surface where they undergo autocatalytic replication, revealing a rich phase diagram of extinction, steady-state, and growth regimes in three or higher dimensions and providing an explicit analytical description of the population size statistics and its slow power-law convergence to steady state.
This paper investigates the bipartite entanglement entropy of Bethe states across various integrable spin chains, systematically identifying the specific solutions that minimize and maximize entanglement, revealing that while the ground state often minimizes entropy in the XXX model, this correspondence breaks down in higher-spin and non-compact chains, and further developing an optimization algorithm to explore maximum entanglement for off-shell states.
This paper revisits Otto-Villani functional inequalities to establish a geometric framework linking free energy dissipation and optimal transport for quantifying the relaxation speed of conservative stochastic systems toward steady states, with numerical validation on Landau-Ginzburg potentials.
This paper presents a quantitative, unsupervised approach that combines Natural Language Processing with complex systems theory to analyze a diachronic corpus of 600,000 Italian newspaper articles from 1985 to 2000, successfully detecting major historical turning points in media discourse without relying on prior labeling.
This paper proves that nonequilibrium steady states on large dense networks exhibit Boltzmann-like occupation probabilities despite extensive entropy production, driven by the principle that these systems spend more time in states they exit more slowly.
This study numerically demonstrates that the percolation of rod-like particles through a static bed of spheres is governed by a transition between trapping and passing regimes determined by rod length and pore geometry, where shorter rods move nearly twice as fast as longer ones due to reduced susceptibility to geometric trapping.