Topics in disordered systems
Physics (00A79) Introductory exposition (textbooks, tutorial papers, etc.) pertaining to probability theory (60-01) Interacting random processes; statistical mechanics type models; percolation theory (60K35) Introductory exposition (textbooks, tutorial papers, etc.) pertaining to statistical mechanics (82-01) Disordered systems (random Ising models, random Schrödinger operators, etc.) in equilibrium statistical mechanics (82B44) Statistical mechanics of random media, disordered materials (including liquid crystals and spin glasses) (82D30)
This small book contains the lecture notes of a post-graduate course on disordered systems given at the Mathematics Department of the ETH-Zürich. They deal with the equilibrium statistical mechanics of Ising-spin systems on lattices with random interactions from the point of view of mathematical physics and probability theory. There are no textbooks and few reviews in this field and so the appearance of this introductory text is most timely and welcome. Rather than giving an overview of the entire field of disordered systems, this booklet concentrates on a narrow class of models, namely Ising-spin systems with random nearest neighbor interactions. These comprise the maybe most interesting model of all, the Edwards-Anderson (EA) model of a spin glass, and, in fact, most of the most interesting questions arising in the theory of disordered systems can be posed (if not answered) in this context. Clearly, the entire text is geared towards the big problem of the field: How to describe and analyse the low-temperature phase of the EA-model? Of the four sections of the book, the first three deal with related, but simpler questions. They are devoted to ground states properties. Section 1 treats the ground states in a model with random, but ferromagnetic (non-negative) interactions. Although two obvious translation invariant ground states are immediately identified, other ground states, containing interfaces may or may not exist, and this problem turns out to be already a very complex and tricky one. Allowing couplings to take arbitrary signs makes the problem even harder. In Section 2 a very peculiar model of that type is considered, in which the strength of certain couplings grows without limit as the volume increases which allows to construct infinitely many ground states in certain situations. Section 3 takes us to the high temperature regime. The issue here is to prove uniqueness of the Gibbs state in a region as large as possible. In all three sections percolation theory is a recurring theme that enters as a main tool to tackle the problems at hand. Section 4 is the largest and most important section of the book. It deals with the central issue of how the low-temperature phase of the EA model could look like, and in particular, to what extent the predictions of mean-field theory (the ``Parisi picture) could be applicable. To investigate this issue, a rather new and original conceptual approach to the mathematical description of disordered systems in terms of so-called ``meta-states (probability measures on the space of Gibbs measures) is introduced and its consequences for the problem at hand are discussed. Some of the more technical details of this approach are elaborated in an appendix. In the opinion of the reviewer, this approach is an important contribution to the field and it is very nice to have an introductory exposition in these notes. This book will be useful for the active researcher in the field but is also accessible to advanced graduate students with some background in statistical mechanics.
- Mathematics and physics of disordered systems
- scientific article; zbMATH DE number 897997
- scientific article; zbMATH DE number 4096554
- The physics of disordered systems.
- Percolation and disordered systems
- scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1122431
- scientific article; zbMATH DE number 4161802
- Advances in disordered systems, random processes and some applications
- Disordered dynamical systems
- Additivity properties for value-at-risk under archimedean dependence and heavy-tailedness
- Metastates in disordered mean-field models: Random field and Hopfield models
- A note on exponential decay in the random field Ising model
- On the structure of KMS states of disordered systems
- On the averaged dynamics of the random field Curie-Weiss model.
- Extreme value behavior in the Hopfield model
- A representation of Gibbs measure for the random energy model.
- Properties of the parabolic Anderson model and the Anderson polymer model
- The roles of random boundary conditions in spin systems
- Absence of backward infinite paths for first-passage percolation in arbitrary dimension
- Busemann functions and Gibbs measures in directed polymer models on \(\mathbb{Z}^2 \)
- Uniqueness and non-uniqueness for spin-glass ground states on trees
- Busemann functions and infinite geodesics in two-dimensional first-passage percolation
- Overlaps and pathwise localization in the Anderson polymer model
- Slab percolation and phase transitions for the Ising model
- Uniqueness of translation-covariant zero-temperature metastate in disordered Ising ferromagnets
- Introduction to the replica theory of disordered statistical systems
- Progress in the mathematical theory of quantum disordered systems
- Gibbs states of continuum particle systems with unbounded spins: existence and uniqueness
- Gibbs states on random configurations
- Localization in log-gamma polymers with boundaries
- Probability theory in statistical physics, percolation, and other random topics: the work of C. Newman
- Metastates, Translation Ergodicity, and Simplicity of Thermodynamic States in Disordered Systems: an Illustration
- Localization transition for polymers in Poissonian medium
- scientific article; zbMATH DE number 3978105 (Why is no real title available?)
- scientific article; zbMATH DE number 4096554 (Why is no real title available?)
- Invasion percolation on the Poisson-weighted infinite tree
- Bigeodesics in first-passage percolation
- Non-existence of bi-infinite geodesics in the exponential corner growth model
- A shape theorem for Riemannian first-passage percolation
- Short-range spin glasses and random overlap structures
- Statistical Mechanics of Disordered Systems
- Disordered fermions on lattices and their spectral properties
- An ultrametric state space with a dense discrete overlap distribution: paperfolding sequences
- Coalescence of geodesics and the BKS midpoint problem in planar first-passage percolation
- The ground state energy per site of the quantum and classical Edwards-Anderson spin glass in the thermodynamic limit
- Metastates in mean-field models with random external fields generated by Markov chains
- Non-constant ground configurations in the disordered ferromagnet
- Metastability in Glauber dynamics for heavy-tailed spin glasses
- KMS states and the chemical potential for disordered systems
- Minimal spanning forests
- Two connections between random systems and non-Gibbsian measures
- A coarse graining for the Fortuin-Kasteleyn measure in random media
- Metastates in finite-type mean-field models: Visibility, invisibility, and random restoration of symmetry
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