Colloquium on 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics

 Every year the UQ Physics Department has a colloquium where someone describes the science behind the latest Nobel Prize. This year I am going to talk about Parisi and the spin glass problem. My colleague Henry Nourse will talk about the climate modelling part.

In preparation, I have found the book, Spin Glasses and Complexity by Daniel L. Stein and Charles M. Newman, very helpful. It is at the level of a colloquium and has a nice chapter on applications to other areas of science (e.g. proteins, simulated annealing, optimisation, computer science, ...) It enabled me to finally "understand" the background and significance of Hopfield's famous paper from 1982, "Neural networks and physical systems with emergent collective computational abilities".

Thinking about replica symmetry breaking has brought back memories of when I was a graduate student at Princeton. When I started Anderson was thinking about spin glasses a lot and had people working on it. I heard lots of talks about spin glasses, replica symmetry breaking, travelling salesmen, ultrametricity, ... Even David Gross gave a colloquium about work he did on spin glasses, with a very warm introduction by Phil. ["I introduce David Gross the condensed matter theorist"] However, once the cuprates happened at the end of 1986, Anderson seemed to largely drop the spin-glass work. Except for Dan Stein, everyone started working on cuprates. In hindsight, I wonder if that was a mistake. In particular, it might have been better for many of his students if they had worked on complexity rather than cuprates.

Next week I will post a draft of my slides. In the meantime, two questions for readers:

1. What are some specific questions you might like answered in such a colloquium?

2. What are some specific resources you may have come across about this year's prize that you found helpful or interesting?

Comments

  1. Gian GuzmanOctober 29, 2021 at 12:32 AM

    Dear Ross,

    I've always found "Introduction to the Replica Theory of Disordered Statistical Systems" by Viktor Dotsenko a great intro to the subject (https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511524592). The discussion and presentation are transparent and with great care for detail. Perhaps you might find it useful too if you don't know it already

    ReplyDelete
  2. AlirezaOctober 30, 2021 at 3:40 AM

    Something that I am wondering is that if replica symmetry is a real symmetry of the system or only a mathematical tool.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Zou Ling-NanNovember 2, 2021 at 11:28 PM

    This is a long standing question, but I’m interested in what your take may be: is replica symmetry breaking the right fixed point for describing the physics of low dimensional D =3 spin glasses?

    ReplyDelete

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