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Probability and Combinatorics

Tuesday, October 10, 2017 - 3:00pm

Sourav Chatterjee

Stanford

Location

University of Pennsylvania

DRL 4C8

The mathematical analysis of Coulomb gases, especially in dimensions higher than one, has been the focus of much recent activity. For the 3D Coulomb, there is a famous prediction of Jancovici, Lebowitz and Manificat that if N is the number of particles falling in a given region, then N has fluctuations of order cube-root of E(N). I will talk about the recent proof of this conjecture for a closely related model, known as the 3D hierarchical Coulomb gas. I will also try to explain, through some toy examples, why such unusually small fluctuations may be expected to appear in interacting gases.