Speaker: Giuseppe Mussardo
Affiliation: International School for Advanced Studies SISSA-Trieste

Abstract:
Statistical field theory, an important subject of theoretical physics that has undergone formidable progress in recent years.
Most of the attractiveness of this field comes from its profound interdisciplinary nature and its mathematical elegance; it sets outstanding challenges in several scientific areas, such as statistical mechanics, quantum field theory (QFT) and mathematical physics.
Statistical field theory deals, in short, with the behaviour of classical or quantum systems consisting of an enormous number of degrees of freedom. Those systems have different phases, and the rich spectrum of the phenomena they give rise introduces several questions: What is their ground state in each phase? What is the nature of the phase transitions? What is the spectrum of the excitations? Can we compute the correlation functions of their order parameters? Can we estimate their finite size effects?
The aim of the seminar is to show how one can reach a general understanding of the critical phenomena on the basis of a few physical principles, which give rise to the remarkable properties of Conformal Field Theory and S-Matrix Bootstrap Principle. We discuss in particular the exact solution of the 2d Ising model in a magnetic field and its relation to the exceptional algebra E8.


Giuseppe Mussardo is a Full Professor of Theoretical Physics at SISSA. He belongs to the Statistical Physics Research Group (which he founded in 2005) and the associated PhD. He is also National Chairman of the INFN special iniative Statistical Field Theory and he was in the past scientific consultant of the Condensed Matter and Statistical Physics Group at the Abdus Salam International Centre of Theoretical Physics (ICTP), Trieste. He is member of the International Scientific Board of the International Institute of Physics in Natal (Brazil) and Galileo Galilei Institute in Florence (Italy).
He is interested in history of science and worked to increase its public awareness. Author of several articles and books on history of science and the documentary movies Galois. Story of a revolutionary mathematician (2017); Maksimovic. The Story of Bruno Pontecorvo (2013); Abdus Salam. The dream of symmetry (2011); Chandra. The journey of a star (2009); Boltzmann. The genius of disorder (2006). He gave numerous public lectures and has been awarded the 2013 Prize of Societa’ Italiana di Fisica for Science Dissemination.

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