Date: Wednesday, November 13, 2002
Time: 4:30 PM
Location: 117, Hayes-Healy Hall, Notre Dame

Speaker: Joel L. Lebowitz

From: Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

A prolific researcher in equilibrium and nonequilibrium statistical mechanics, Joel Lebowitz, together with Elliot Lieb, proved in 1970 the existence of the thermodynamic limit for Coulomb systems. In recent years, he has contributed to our understanding of nonequilibrium systems. Prof. Lebowitz, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, is not only a renowned mathematician and physicist but also a tireless organizer and editor in statistical mechanics. For over thirty-five years, his famous informal Conferences on Statistical mechanics, known as the "Lebowitz Meetings", have attracted top international experts and have been invaluable to young people. He is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Statistical Physics.

Host: Mark S. Alber (Mathematics)

Title: Microscopic Origin of Macroscopic Behavior

Abstract:
Statistical Mechanics provides a framework for describing how well-defined behavior may result from the nondirected activity of a multitude of interacting individual entities. The subject was developed for, and has had its greatest success so far in, relating mesoscopic and macroscopic thermal phenomena to the microscopic world of atoms and molecules. Some of the phenomena are simple additive effects of the actions of individual atoms, e.g., the pressure exerted by gas in the walls of its container, while others are paradigms of emergent behavior, having no direct counterpart in the properties of dynamics of individual atoms.Particularly fascinating and important examples of such emergent phenomena are phase transitions which would (or should) be astonishing if they were not so familiar. I will give an overview of recent developments in this field and discuss ways in which one may adapt the methods of statistical mechanics to higher level collective systems in which the relevant basic constituents are themselves more complex than those for which the theory was developed.