ELFT HÍRADÓ

[Szommer Peter <szpl AT metal.elte.hu>]

ELTE Fizikai Intézet

                            ORTVAY KOLLOKVIUM
                                
                    2011. április 28., csütörtök, 15-16.30
                Az ELTE Pázmány Péter s. 1/A alatti épületében
                         a földszinti 0.81 előadóban

                Ünnepi előadóülés Szépfalusy Péter tiszteletére
                    közelgő 80. születésnapja alkalmából
                
		  



Előadások:

Prof. Robert Graham, University Duisburg-Essen
Ultracold Bosons in Quenched Disorder

Recent progress in the theoretical understanding of ultracold Bose-gases
in potentials with quenched disorder is reviewed. This so-called dirty
boson problem appeared first with superfluid Helium in porous glasses
and is nowadays of renewed practical relevance e.g. in the context of
miniaturizing Bose-Einstein condensates on chips. An independent strong
theoretical interest derives from the antagonizing competition between
Anderson-localization and interaction, and between disorder and
superfluidity.


Prof. Imre Kondor, ELTE
Critical phenomena, scaling, universality: From liquid helium to
financial regulation

I learned about critical phenomena from Péter Szépfalusy back around
1967, and, thanks to his accepting me as a student and collaborator, I
had the great fortune of observing from close the unfolding of a major
intellectual revolution culminating in Kadanoff's universality and
Wilson's renormalization group. I witnessed the subsequent invasion of a
number of fields, from soft condensed matter, nonlinear systems, neural
networks, biology, social sciences to finance, by armadas of physicists
marching under the banner, made of log-log paper, of universality. I
started to discern the limitations of universality driven thinking when
pondering chaos in spin glasses, and by now, when my work is mostly
about systemic risk and financial regulation, I have come to be
convinced that complexity constitutes a formidable challenge, if not an
unsurmountable barrier, to our physicist's instinct of reductionism. All
this notwithstanding, fond memories of and guidance from those late
afternoon discussions in a small office looking out on the darkening
canyon of Pushkin street have never abandoned me along my itinerary.