Centre Blaise Pascal

COMPUTATION OF TRANSITION TRAJECTORIES AND RARE EVENTS IN NON-EQUILIBRIUM SYSTEMS

APPLICATIONS IN TURBULENCE, CHEMISTRY, (BIO)PHYSICS

June 11–15, 2012

ENS de Lyon, France

"Magnetic field reversals in an experimental turbulent dynamo" EPL, 77 (2007) 59001

This meeting aims at developing the theoretical foundations of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics to advance new algorithms, specifically designed to compute the statistics of non-equilibrium systems. A special focus will be given on the computation of transitions trajectories and rare events.

The meeting will focus on methods such as large deviation theory, instanton theory, transition path sampling, action minimization, importance sampling, multilevel splitting, and related approaches. The recent concepts of 'thermodynamics of histories', dynamical phase transitions, and statistics of trajectories will also be emphasized.

Several applications of these methods and concepts will be discussed in the contexts of turbulence, chemical reactions, liquids, glasses, polymers. In addition, the meeting will gather mathematicians who have made recent contributions to the analysis of some of the methods.

This meeting is partly organized as a CNRS école thématique. Thus, it should be interdisciplinary and should promote both research and teaching. For this reason, we ask specialists to present their respective fields in a pedagogical way so as to benefit non-specialist researchers.

Chemical reactions inside proteins, by Bolhuis group

Invited speakers:

Lectures:
David Chandler (UC Berkeley, USA)
Pierre Del Moral (Inria Bordeaux Sud-Ouest, France)
Bernard Derrida (Laboratoire de Physique Statistique ENS, France)
Krzysztof Gawedzki (Laboratoire de Physique ENS de Lyon, France)
Jorge Kurchan (ESPCI, France)
Christof Schütte (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany)
Eric Vanden-Eijnden (Courant Institute, USA)

Talks:
Peter Bolhuis (Universiteit van Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Sergio Ciliberto (Laboratoire de Physique ENS de Lyon, France)
Martin Evans (The University of Edinburgh, UK)
Gregory Falkovich (Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel)
Peter Grassberger (University of Calgary, Canada)
Wolfhard Janke (Universität Leipzig, Germany)
Tony Lelièvre (Ecole des Ponts ParisTech, France)
David Mukamel (Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel)
François Pétrélis (Laboratoire de Physique Statistique ENS, France)
Jean-François Pinton (Laboratoire de Physique ENS de Lyon, France)
Leonard Sander (The University of Michigan, USA)
Udo Seifert (Universität Stuttgart, Germany)
Julien Tailleur (Université Paris 7–CNRS, France)
Pieter Rein ten Wolde (FOM Institute AMOLF, Netherlands)
Florian Theil (University of Warwick, UK)
Massimo Vergassola (Institut Pasteur, France)
Frédéric Van Wijland (Université Paris 7, France)
Oleg Zaboronski (University of Warwick, UK)

Organizing committee:

Freddy Bouchet
Frédéric Cérou
Marianne Corvellec
Arnaud Guyader
Hugo Touchette

Administrative coordination by Samantha Barendson.

This meeting is supported by
ANR STATOCEAN