Pedro Nunes' Lecture - 2022

Sylvia Serfaty

Sylvia Serfaty is Silver Professor of Mathematics at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in New York University. She studied at Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris (MSc Mathematics (1995) and Doctoral Studies), at Université Paris-Sud, Orsay (PhD in mathematics (1999), under the supervision of Fabrice Bethuel) and Université Pierre et Marie Curie Paris 6 ("habilitation" to direct research (2002)).

Her research interests revolve around analysis, Partial Differential Equations and mathematical physics. She has focused in particular on the Ginzburg-Landau model of superconductivity, and recently on the statistical mechanics of Coulomb-type systems.

Among many other distinctions, she was one of the laureates of the 2004 European Mathematical Society Prize and of the 2012 Henri Poincaré prize of the IAMP, the recipient of the 2013 Grand prix Mergier-Bourdeix de l'Académie des Sciences de Paris and was plenary speaker at the 2012 European Congress of Mathematics and at the 2018 International Congress of Mathematicians in Rio de Janeiro. In 2019 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

16th of November at 03:00 pm (Lisbon time)

TITLE: Systems of points with Coulomb interactions

ABSTRACT:
Large ensembles of points with Coulomb interactions arise in various settings of condensed matter physics, classical and quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, random matrices and even approximation theory, and they give rise to a variety of questions pertaining to analysis, Partial Differential Equations and probability.
We will first review these motivations, then present the ''mean-field'' derivation of effective models and equations describing the system at the macroscopic scale. We then explain how to analyze the next order behavior, giving information on the configurations at the microscopic level and connecting with crystallization questions, and finish with the description of the effect of temperature.

Video recording: http://www.mat.uc.pt/~clcmat/videos/PNL_2022.mp4