Colloquium
March 18, 2022 from 15:30 to 16:30 (Montreal/EST time)
The importance of large deviations in non-equilibrium systems
Colloquium presented by Bernard Derrida (École Normale Supérieure)
2022 Aisenstadt Chair recipient
Statistical Physics allowed to unify, at the end of the 19th century, Newton's mechanics and thermodynamics. It gave a way to predict the amplitude of fluctuations around the physical laws which were known at that time. Einstein, in his very first works, showed that the measurement of these fluctuations allowed to estimate the size of atoms. His reasoning, which was at the origin of the linear response theory, applied to the black body gave one of the first evidences of the duality wave-particle in Quantum Mechanics. Statistical Physics gives also a framework to predict large deviations for systems at equilibrium. In the last two decades, major efforts were devoted to extend our understanding of the statistical laws of fluctuations and large deviations to non-equilibrium systems. This talk will try to present some of the recent progresses.
