Room P3.10, Mathematics Building

Alessandra Occelli, Instituto Superior Técnico
A short KPZ story

The aim of this talk is to present a few models in the Kardar–Parisi–Zhang (KPZ) universality class, a class of stochastic growth models that have been widely studied in the last 30 years. We will focus in particular on last passage percolation (LPP) models. They provide a physical description of combinatorial problems, such as Ulam's problem, in terms of zero temperature directed polymers; but also a geometric interpretation of an interacting particle system, the totally asymmetric simple exclusion process (TASEP); and of a system of queues and servers. Moreover, in the large time limit, they share statistical features with certain ensembles of random matrices.

Projecto FCT UID/MAT/04459/2019.