May 2 Alexandru Gatea, Bahen 6183

[Benjamin Landon]

Hi all,

Tomorrow Alexandru Gatea will give a seminar from 2:10pm-4:00pm in Bahen 6183. Title and abstract are below.

Title: Grid Entropy and a Variational Formula for Gibbs Free Energy

Abstract: The Directed Polymer model is of great importance in percolation theory. In the setting of North-East paths on the integer lattice ℤd, we can derive a variational formula for the point-to-point Gibbs Free Energy by "counting" the normalized empirical measures of paths which converge to a fixed target measure. We make this precise by defining the general notion of grid entropy. We give three completely different descriptions of grid entropy, and outline some of its properties, such as the fact that it is a directed norm with negative sign and that the sum of grid entropy and relative entropy is bounded above by the total entropy of the number of paths. This builds on recent work by Eric Bates.