Event Archive

Henri Orland - The Physics of Complex and Disordered Systems: the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics of Giorgio Parisi

Wednesday, December 22, 2021 at 10:45am - 11:45am

Henri Orland - Institute of Theoretical Physics

Wednesday, December 22, 10:45AM (Zoom meeting starts at 10:30)

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“The Physics of Complex and Disordered Systems: the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics of Giorgio Parisi”

The aim of this talk is to give an introduction to the physics of complex and disordered systems, with an emphasis on the works that earned Giorgio Parisi the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics. After explaining what are disordered systems, we introduce the concept of replicas and Parisi's replica symmetry breaking, and illustrate it on the simplest spin-glass model, the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model. We discuss the enormous impact of these concepts on the physics of proteins, on combinatorial optimization and simulated annealing, and on neural networks and their applications to machine learning.