1581 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 study demonstrates that a sheared granular gas with velocity-dependent restitution exhibits a discontinuous, S-shaped transition in shear viscosity between low- and high-shear Bagnold-type regimes, driven purely by kinetic effects rather than frictional contacts or jamming.
This paper demonstrates that a minimal autonomous heat engine, consisting of a discrete ratchet and an underdamped harmonic oscillator, can strongly violate the thermodynamic uncertainty relation by achieving arbitrarily low TUR ratios near maximal current and efficiency through increasingly deterministic internal control.
This paper establishes that for a broad family of Gaussian additive models, the computational power of low-degree polynomial estimators is mathematically equivalent to the monotonicity of the annealed Franz-Parisi potential, thereby providing a rigorous link between statistical physics predictions and algorithmic hardness lower bounds.
This paper presents a unified micromagnetic study of surface acoustic wave-driven spin wave dynamics in CoFeB films, demonstrating that the orientation of magnetic anisotropy acts as a tunable parameter to optimize resonant coupling, particularly when the wave propagates parallel to the external magnetic field.
This paper extends a mean-field lattice model to three dimensions to investigate how the interplay between solvent criticality, particle affinities, and hard-sphere packing in a binary colloid mixture near a critical solvent point drives complex changes in phase diagram topology and offers insights into the reversible, temperature-controlled self-assembly of colloidal alloys.
This paper establishes that while non-Hermitian and Lindblad decay dynamics are equivalent in the highest particle subspace, the accuracy of non-Hermitian descriptions is strictly limited to weak-coupling and singular-coupling regimes, thereby questioning their validity for more complex systems and proving that exceptional points cannot occur in the weak-coupling limit for nondegenerate Hamiltonians.
This paper investigates the slow mixing and resonant unmixing phenomena in high-dimensional reflective Hamiltonian Monte Carlo with inexact reflections by quantifying distribution non-uniformity via Sinkhorn divergence, revealing critical step-size scaling laws and fluid-like versus discretisation-dominated dynamics in spherical and cubic domains.
This paper demonstrates that in random symmetric centrosymmetric matrices with a global symmetry, thermalization of local observables is violated and accurately described by the generalized Gibbs ensemble, while specific initial states exhibit non-decaying behavior linked to spontaneous symmetry breaking in a measure-zero fraction of the ensemble.
This paper demonstrates that neural ordinary differential equations can effectively model out-of-equilibrium quantum many-body dynamics via the time-dependent two-particle reduced density matrix only when strong correlations exist between two- and three-particle cumulants, thereby serving as a diagnostic tool to identify regimes where memory-dependent reconstruction schemes are necessary.
This paper demonstrates that the rate of quantum phase slips in parametrically driven oscillators is exponentially sensitive to weak AC perturbations, allowing the real-time instanton trajectories responsible for qubit decoherence to be directly visualized and characterized through the system's logarithmic susceptibility spectrum.