CANCELLED

HEP Theory Journal Club

Spin Glasses and Complexity

Omar Chammaa

McGill

Spin glasses, although at first sight may seem humble and innocuous enough, turn out to live at the intersection of many active areas of research: Neural networks, protein dynamics and folding, computer science, and combinatorial optimization. In addition, they exhibit interesting out-of-equilibrium properties such as memory and aging. In this talk, I will try to motivate their study, go over their history, survey their unusual and bizarre properties, and discuss their dynamics and replica symmetry breaking. If time permits, I?ll discuss the recent observation by Guy Gur-Ari (arXiv:1806.10145) indicating that the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model does not have a spin glass transition. The talk is pretty non-technical.