Dear Colleagues and Students,
You are cordially invited to UNAM Nanocolloquium seminars focusing on advancements in the field of nanoscience and nanotechnology. The seminars bring us the most recent developments in these exciting fields. This week’s talk will be presented by Dr. Satya Majumdar*
Title: “KPZ story”
Date: March 29, 2019 (Friday)
Refreshments: 15:40
Time: 16:00
Place: UNAM Conference Hall
ABSTRACT:
The celebrated KPZ equation (Kardar, Parisi, Zhang, 1986) is an important milestone in statistical physics, originally introduced to describe the late time dynamics in two dimensional growth models. Over the last 30 years, the KPZ story has evolved in various interesting directions, making links on the way to different areas of physics and mathematics. This includes in particular the link to the famous Tracy-Widom distribution in random matrix theory. The story of KPZ is a very successful one, involving theoretical physics, mathematics and experiments–a fertile playground for interdisciplinary science. In this talk, I will review the evolution of the KPZ story, pointing out the important landmarks as I go along. At the very end, I will discuss some recent developments establishing a nice link between the KPZ height fluctuations and the edge physics in cold atom systems.
About the Speaker:
Satya Majumdar is a research director at CNRS (Center for National Scientifc Research) in France, working at LPTMS (Laboratoire de Physique Theorique et Modeles Statisques), Universite Paris-Sud (Orsay). He did his Ph.D in 1992 at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bombay (India) on `self-organized criticality in sandpile and related models’. He then did a two years postodoc at AT&T Bell Labs in USA, followed by two years at Yale University. He joined Tata Institute as a faculty in 1996. In 2000, he joined CNRS in France, first at the Universite Paul-Sabatier at Toulouse and since 2004 at the Universite Paris-Sud (Orsay). He has worked in a broad area of equilibrium and non-equilibrium statistical physics, including sandpile models and granular materials, transport in superconductors, phase ordering dynamics in out of equilibrium systems, persistence and first-passage properties in stochastic processes, interface growth problems, extreme value statistcs, search problems, Brownian motion, random matrix theory and cold atoms. He is a recipient of several national and international prizes including the Paul Langevin medal (2005) of the French Physical Society, Excellence award by the Tata Institute Alumni Association (2009), European Physical Society prize for Statistical and Nonlinear physics (2019) and the CNRS silver medal (2019).
* CNRS (Center for National Scientific Research) Universite Paris-Sud