Probability and Mathematical Physics Seminar

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Confinement of Unimodal Probability Distributions and an FKG-Gaussian Correlation Inequality

Speaker: Mark Sellke, Harvard University

Location: Warren Weaver Hall 1302

Date: Friday, April 26, 2024, 11:10 a.m.

Notes:

While unimodal probability distributions are well understood in dimension 1, the same cannot be said in high dimension without imposing stronger conditions such as log-concavity. I will explain a new approach to proving confinement (e.g. variance upper bounds) for high-dimensional unimodal distributions which are not log-concave, based on an extension of Royen’s celebrated Gaussian correlation inequality. We will see how it yields new localization results for Ginzburg-Landau random surfaces with very general monotone potentials. Time permitting, I will also discuss a related result on the effective mass of the Fröhlich Polaron, which is joint work with Rodrigo Bazaes, Chiranjib Mukherjee, and S.R.S. Varadhan.