Special CMSP Seminar at Stasi Seminar Rm Thursday 24 and Friday 25 November - T. MAIMBOURGH

[Condensed Matter Section]

Special Condensed Matter & Statistical Physics Seminar
===================================

Thursday 24 November at 15:00 hrs - Part I
and
Friday 25 November at 11.30 a.m. - Part II

Luigi Stasi Seminar Room, first floor, ICTP Leonardo Building

Speaker: Thibaud MAIMBOURGH  (ICTP, Trieste)

Title: "Theory of High-Dimensional Liquids and Glasses"

Abstract:
The dynamics of liquids, regarded as strongly-interacting classical 
particle
systems, remains a field where theoretical descriptions are limited. So 
far,
there is no microscopic theory starting from first principles and using 
controlled
approximations. At the thermodynamic level, static equilibrium 
properties are
well understood in simple liquids only far from glassy regimes.

In this seminar, I will introduce the long-standing problems of the 
dynamics
of classical liquids and the glass transition. I will review the 
insights obtained
from the study of mean-field spin glasses, giving birth to a generic 
scenario to
glassy systems, the random first-order transition (RFOT) theory. On this 
basis,
I will present the recent derivation of the dynamics of liquids and 
structural glasses
using the limit of large spatial dimension, which provides a 
well-defined mean-field
approximation with a clear small parameter. In parallel, one recovers their
thermodynamics through an analogy between dynamics and statics. This 
gives a
unifying and consistent view of the phase diagram of these systems. We 
showed that
this mean-field solution to the structural glass problem is an example 
of the RFOT
scenario, as conjectured thirty years ago. These results allow to show 
that an
approximate scale invariance of the system, relevant to 
finite-dimensional experiments
and simulations, becomes exact in this limit.