Workshop "Qualitative Methods in KPZ Universality" at CIRM

From the workshop website:

Universality of Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) scalings is one the most active areas in statistical mechanics and mathematical physics in the last 10 years. A big progress has been achieved very recently in deriving exact formulas related to Tracy-Widom distributions and Airy processes. It was shown by exact calculations that many models belong to the KPZ universality class. This can be done only for specific exactly integrable models. However, it is expected that universality holds for extremely general class of disordered systems in dimension 1+1. It is a very rare case when highly non-trivial scaling behaviour describes both zero temperature (geodesics in random metric, first (last) passage percolation, action minimizing paths and positive temperature regimes. Despite very clean and concrete predictions and a wide belief in the validity of the conjectures, there has been very little progress in our understanding of the problem of universality. The proposed workshop will concentrate on qualitative methods which are applicable in a very general situation. One of the strategies is based on the analysis of global solutions to the random Hamilton-Jacobi equation.

The main goal is to prove that the stationary Busemann function will have diffusive behaviour which implies KPZ scalings. Another direction is related to stability analysis for renormalization fixed point corresponding to Airy process.

Most of the meetings in this area are dealing with exact formulas and exactly solvable models. The proposed workshop is the first one which aims to concentrate on the problem of universality.

Photos

A very nice lecture hall at CIRM

Cliffs by the sea

A Friday afternoon hike