About 100 physicists from all over the world got together in Rome at the start of the 2018 to discuss recent advances to go beyond mean-field theory in statistical physics and statistical field theory. Researchers from different horizons — studying glasses, disordered systems, many-body localization, conformal field theory and others — looked for synergies at the rapidly evolving interfaces between these subfields. The event was funded by the Simons Collaboration on “Cracking the glass problem” but also featured a session on conformal bootstrap, which is the subject of another Simons Collaboration. The gathering was also the occasion to honor the life and the memory of Cyrano De Dominicis, who made key contributions to these different topics during his long and illustrious career.

The slides will be made available on the workshop home page:
https://sites.google.com/view/bmft/home

A workshop on the recent advances of the yielding transition in amorphous solids took place in Paris on October 26-28, 2017, with the support of the Simons collaboration on Cracking the glass problem. The review talks of the six speakers spanned complementary features and pending issues of the yielding transition, studied from different theoretical perspectives. These presentations are available on the workshop website: https://sites.google.com/site/yieldingworkshop/.

The citation for the award reads: “for her use of computational and analytical tools to develop microscopic understanding of flow in disordered materials, ranging from metallic glasses to biological tissues.” This award will be presented at this year’s March Meeting in Los Angeles.

Information here: https://courses.ipht.cnrs.fr/?q=en/node/194

Disordered and frustrated systems comprise a vibrant research area in condensed matter physics with applications in fields ranging from mathematics to biology. At their core, these systems share universal features–such as rough free energy landscapes and rich sets of phase transitions–that can be understood and unified with ideas from physics. The 2017 Boulder School surveyed the intimate connection between these seemingly different problems, and introduced key notions in the physics of disordered systems. This school served more than 60 graduate students and post-docs and will be instrumental in creating a new generation of researchers into frustrated and disordered systems.

Dear Friends,

With Giorgio Parisi and Francesco Zamponi we are organizing, in the context of our Simons Collaboration, the workshop “Beyond Mean Field Theory: Renormalisation Group and Non Perturbative approaches in Disordered and Glassy Systems” with a limited number of talks and a lot of discussion time.

The description of the workshop and the list of speakers are on the site https://sites.google.com/view/bmft/home. The emphasis of the workshop being on discussions, we will associate to each intervention a “discussant” with the role of commenting, clarifying and perhaps challenging each of the talks during 15 minutes and introduce a general discussion.

Please let us know if you will be able to participate. I hope to see you in Rome in January.

Best regards,

Silvio

In a work published in Physical Review Letters (2017) https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.215701 P. Charbonneau and S. Yaida show that the exotic phase transition predicted for infinite-dimensional glassy models can survive down to the physical dimension we live in. The work was notably featured in the following:

https://today.duke.edu/2017/05/breaking-glass-infinite-dimensions

https://gizmodo.com/mathematicians-reignite-thirty-year-old-debate-about-gl-1795758857

Congratulations to Silvio Franz for his nomination for a 5 year appointment as Senior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France.

The Jamming Transition and the Marginally Jammed State – Andrea Liu – University of Pennsylvania

Elementary Excitations in Amorphous Materials – Matthieu Wyart – EPFL, Institute of Physics
(Slides)