Talk by Sylvia Serfaty - From superconductors to Coulomb gases: crystallization questions
Channel: Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHÉS)
Date: 2022-04-22

Sylvia Serfaty is the Silver Professor of Mathematics at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University

Abstract: The physicist Abrikosov predicted that in certain superconductors, one should observe triangular lattices of vortices, now called Abrikosov lattices. When studying ground states of Coulomb gases, which is motivated by questions in approximation theory, random matrix theory and statistical physics, one also expects the same lattices to appear. This crystallization phenomenon turns out to be related to the Cohn-Kumar conjecture about the universal minimality of certain special lattices in dimensions 2, 8 and 24 and recently solved in dimensions 8 and 24.