Joint ICTP/SISSA SP Seminar 26.01@ SISSA Via Bonomea 265 room 128 at 11:00 a.m.: Giorgio Parisi

[Condensed Matter Section]

JOINT ICTP/SISSA STATISTICAL PHYSICS SEMINAR

Thursday January 26 - 11:00 a.m.

SISSA, Via Bonomea 265, room 128

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Speaker: Giorgio PARISI (Univ. di Roma 'La Sapienza')

Title:
The Physics of Jamming: A Journey from Marble Pebbles toward Scaling 
Invariant Field Theory.

Abstract: Jamming is a well know phenomenon that you have experienced 
when the traffic if
very heavy. You cannot move because your neighbors block you and your 
neighbors cannot
move because you block them. Jamming is a collective phenomenon. Marble 
pebbles on the
beach are one example of jamming. However also for well-levigated 
pebbles, friction will plays
an important role.

Statistical mechanics may be used to study the case of systems without 
friction. The most
studied case is the hard sphere gas where the jamming point is reached 
in the limit of infinite
pressure. In the case of frictionless jamming long-range correlations 
are present: we have a
new kind of critical system.

Recently the properties of the hard sphere gas have been analytically 
computed in the framework
of the mean field approximation. Non-trivial critical exponents have 
been found.

The behavior of the correlation functions at large distances has not yet 
computed (it is technically
very challenging): at the end one should find a new scaling invariant 
field theory.

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