Graduate Student / Postdoc Seminar

---

Systems of points with Coulomb interactions

Speaker: Sylvia Serfaty, Courant Institute

Location: Warren Weaver Hall 1302

Date: Friday, February 2, 2018, 1 p.m.

Synopsis:

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.