UVic Dynamics and Probability Seminar: Paul Dario

In 1975, the physicists Imry and Ma predicted that the incorporation of a random field in low-dimensional spin systems leads to the rounding of first-order phase transitions. These predictions were rigorously established by Aizenman and Wehr in 1989 for general spin systems, and recently quantified in the case of the random field Ising model. While the Imry-Ma phenomenon has been mainly studied in the case of compact spin spaces, it has been observed that a similar effect occurs for other models of statistical physics such as random surfaces. In this talk, we will present how the qualitative properties of these models are affected by the additon of a random field and discuss some open questions.