October 1, 2010
Location: Janskerkhof 15a (Utrecht), room 101
On the origin of irreversible macroscopic laws
In the first half of the talk, I will review the general ideas, going back to Boltzmann, on the relationship between microscopic and macroscopic physical laws. In the second half, I will discuss several models of coupled systems for which the derivation of one particular microscopic law, Fourier's law, can be investigated.
Branching Brownian motion with absorption: genealogy, survival probability and the FKPP equation
A series of recent conjectures by B. Derrida, E. Brunet and coauthors concerning the behavior of a class of particle systems related to the noisy (or stochastic) FKPP traveling wave equation have generated a renewed interest in the study of Branching random walks with absorption. We will present some classical and recent results on those models. I will in particular focus on the description of the asymptotic genealogy of those systems, which turns out to be described by the Bolthausen–Sznitman coalescent, a model which is conjectured to be a universal limit in several classes of models in statistical physics.