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Penn Mathematics Colloquium

Wednesday, February 14, 2018 - 3:30pm

Sylvia Serfaty

NYU

Location

University of Pennsylvania

DRL A2

Tea at 3pm before the talk in the Math Dept. Lounge, fourth floor DRL.

Systems of points with Coulomb, logarithmic (or more generally inverse powers of the distance) interactions arise in various settings: an instance is the classical Coulomb gas which in some cases happens to be a random matrix ensemble, another is vortices in the Ginzburg-Landau model of superconductivity, where one observes in certain regimes the emergence of densely packed point vortices forming perfect triangular lattice patterns named Abrikosov lattices, a third is the study of Fekete points which arise in approximation theory.  I will review the motivations, and take a point of view based on the detailed expansion of the interaction
energy to describe the microscopic behavior of the systems and its
statistical mechanics.