Boulder School 2017: Frustrated and Disordered Systems

July 3-28, 2017

Scientific Coordinators

Patrick Charbonneau (Duke)
Eric Corwin (Oregon)
Francesco Zamponi (ENS/CNRS)
Lenka Zdeborová (CEA Saclay/CNRS)

Director: Leo Radzihovsky (Boulder)

 Complex mixing of sand, E. Corwin; Point-to-set correlation in supercooled liquid, P. Charbonneau lab; Additively weighted Voronoi diagram, E. Corwin lab; Spectrum of the non-backtracking matrix of a graph with two communities, L. Zdeborová et al.; and Clustering and phase transition for random constraint satisfaction problems, L. Zdeborová et al.

Disordered and frustrated systems comprise a vibrant research area in condensed matter physics with applications in fields ranging from mathematics to biology. At their core, these systems share universal features–such as rough free energy landscapes and rich sets of phase transitions–that can be understood and unified with ideas from physics. This comprehension largely arises from the study of spin glasses, which since the 1980s has led to a rich array of concepts, methods and tools that describe systems as diverse as piles of grains, biological tissues and computer algorithms. The 2017 Boulder School will survey the intimate connection between these seemingly different problems, and introduce key notions in the physics of disordered systems.


Group Photo


Public Lecture

Lisa Manning, Professor of Physics, Syracuse University, “A Body Made of Glass” in Duane Physics Building, rm. G1B30 on Tuesday, July 10, 2017 at 7:00pm-8:30pm.

Boulder School 2017 Public Lecture with Lisa Manning - A Body Made of Glass


Lecturers and seminar speakers

Gérard Ben Arous (NYU)
Ludovic Berthier (Montpellier)
Giulio Biroli (CEA)
Bulbul Chakraborty (Brandeis)
Henry Cohn (Microsoft)
Leticia Cugliandolo (UPMC)
Karen Daniels (NCSU)
Mark Ediger (UW-Madison)
Surya Ganguli (Stanford)
Sharon Glotzer (Michigan)
Florent Krzakala (ENS-Paris)
Pierre Le Doussal (ENS-Paris)
Andrea Liu (U Penn)
Lisa Manning (Syracuse)
Cris Moore (Santa Fe Institute)
Sid Nagel (Chicago)
David Reichman (Columbia)
Federico Ricci-Tersenghi (Roma La Sapienza)
Guilhem Semerjian (ENS-Paris)
Gilles Tarjus (UPMC)
David Weitz (Harvard)

*Additional funding provided by the Simons Collaboration on Cracking the Glass Problem