Spin Glasses: What's the Big Idea? Is There One?

Speaker: 

Daniel Stein

Institution: 

NYU

Time: 

Wednesday, January 16, 2013 - 4:00pm to 5:00pm

Location: 

NS2 1201

The aim of this talk is to introduce the subject of spin glasses,
and more generally the statistical mechanics of quenched disorder,
as a problem of general interest to physicists from multiple disciplines and
backgrounds. Despite years of study, the physics of quenched
disorder remains poorly understood, and represents a major gap in our
understanding of the condensed state of matter. While there are many
active areas of investigation in this field, I will narrow the focus of this
talk to our current level of understanding of the low-temperature
equilibrium structure of
realistic (i.e., finite-dimensional) spin glasses.

I will begin with a brief survey of why the subject is of interest not only
to physicists,
but also mathematicians, computer scientists, and scientists working in
other areas. A brief review of the basic features of spin glasses and what
is
known experimentally will follow. I will then turn to the problem of
understanding the nature of the spin glass phase --- if it exists.
The central question to be addressed is the nature of broken symmetry in
these systems. Parisi's replica symmetry breaking approach,
now mostly verified for mean field spin glasses, attracted great excitement
and interest as a novel and exotic form of symmetry breaking. But does it
hold also for real spin glasses in finite dimensions? This has been a
subject of intense controversy, and although the issues surrounding it have
become more sharply defined
in recent years, it remains an open question. I will explore this problem,
introducing new mathematical constructs such as the metastate along the way.
The talk will conclude with an examination of how and in which respects the
statistical mechanics of disordered systems might differ from that of
homogeneous systems.

Random potentials for pinning models with gradient and Laplacian interactions.

Speaker: 

Chien-Hao Huang

Institution: 

UCI

Time: 

Tuesday, November 27, 2012 - 11:00am

Location: 

RH 306

Abstract: We consider two models for bio-polymers, the gradient interaction and the Lacplacian one,
both with the Gaussian potential in the random environment. A random field φ : { 0, 1, ..., N } → R^d represents the position of the polymer path. The law of the field is given by exp( − ∑ i |∇ φi |^2 /2) where ∇ is the discrete gradient, and by exp( − ∑ i | ∆φi |^2 /2) where ∆ is the discrete Laplacian. For every Gaussian potential |·|^2 /2, a random charge is added as a factor: (1+βωi) |·|^2 /2 with P (ωi = ± 1) = 1/2 or exp(βωi) |·|^2 /2 with ωi obeys a normal distribution. The interaction with the
origin in the random field space is considered. Each time the field touches the origin, a reward ϵ ≥ 0 is given. Although these models are quite different from the pinning models studied in G. Giacomin (2011), the result about the gap between the annealed critical point and the quenched critical point stays the same.

On the Rate of Convergence for Critical Crossing Probabilities

Speaker: 

Helen Lei

Institution: 

Cal Tech.

Time: 

Tuesday, October 30, 2012 - 11:00am

Location: 

Rowland Hall 306

Abstract: For the site percolation model on the triangular lattice and
certain generalizations for which Cardy’s Formula has been established
we acquire a power law estimate for the rate of convergence of the
crossing probabilities to Cardy’s Formula.

Survival times of Contact Processes on Trees.

Speaker: 

Thomas Mountford

Institution: 

EPFL

Time: 

Tuesday, April 3, 2012 - 11:00am

Location: 

Rowland Hall 306

We consider the time for extinction for a contact process on a tree of bounded degree as the number of vertices tends to infinity. We show that
uniformly over all such trees the extinction time tends to infinity as the
exponential of the number of vertices if the infection parameter is strictly above the critical value for the one dimensional contact process.
An application to the contact process on NSW graphs is given.

The Continuum Directed Random Polymer

Speaker: 

Tom Alberts

Institution: 

Caltech

Time: 

Friday, March 16, 2012 - 1:00pm to 2:00pm

Location: 

Rowland 440R

The discrete directed polymer model is a well studied example of a Gibbsian disordered system and a random walk in a random environment. The usual goal is to understand how the random environment affects the behavior of the underlying walk and how this behavior varies with a temperature parameter that determines the strength of the environment. At infinite temperature the environment has no effect and the walk is the simple random walk, while at zero temperature the environment dominates and the walk follows a single path along which the environment is largest. For temperatures in between there is a competition between the walk wanting to behave diffusively (like simple random walk) and following a path of highest energy (like last passage percolation).

In this talk I will describe recent joint work with Kostya Khanin and Jeremy Quastel for taking a scaling limit of the directed polymer model to construct a continuous path in a continuum environment. We end up with a one-parameter family of random probability measures (indexed by the temperature parameter) that we call the continuum directed random polymer. As the temperature parameter varies the paths cross over from Brownian motion to what is conjectured to be a continuum limit of last passage percolation. This cross over is an inherent feature of the KPZ universality class, which I will also briefly describe.

Quenched asymptotics for Brownian motion in generalized Gaussian potential.

Speaker: 

Professor Xia Chen

Institution: 

University of Tennessee

Time: 

Tuesday, February 7, 2012 - 11:00am

Location: 

RH 306

Recall that the notion of
generalized function is introduced for the functions
that can not be defined pointwise, and
is given as a linear functional over the test functions.
The same idea applies to random fields. In this talk,
we study the quenched asymptotics for Brownian motion
in a generalized Gaussian field. The major ingredient
includes: Solution to
an open problem posted by Carmona and Molchanov (1995) with
an answer different from what was conjectured; the quenched
laws for Brownian motions in Newtonian-type potentials, and in the potentials
driven by white noise or by fractional white noise.

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