Spin Glasses and Related Topics (14w5082)

The Banff International Research Station will host the "Spin Glasses and Related Topics" workshop from July 20th to July 25th, 2014.

Few materials in the history of solid state physics have been as intriguing and perplexing as certain alloys of ferromagnets and conductors, such as $AuFe$ or $CuMg$, known as spin glasses. The attempts to study these magnetic alloys, called spin glasses, theoretically gave rise to a class of disordered spin models, whose analysis by both physicists and mathematicians has grown into one of the most fascinating fields of statistical mechanics over the last $35$ years. The ideas developed by theoretical physicists in the setting of spin glass models have found striking applications in unexpected areas, for example, in the models arising from optimization---such as the satisfiability of Boolean formulas, the matching problem, the traveling salesman problem, the assignment problem, the graph partitioning problem---as well as in the models arising in biology, such as the Hopfield model of neural networks.

The Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery (BIRS) is a collaborative Canada-US-Mexico venture that provides an environment for creative interaction as well as the exchange of ideas, knowledge, and methods within the Mathematical Sciences, with related disciplines and with industry. The research station is located at The Banff Centre in Alberta and is supported by Canada's Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), Alberta's Advanced Education and Technology, and Mexico's Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT).