From 9th to 13th July it is going to be another Statphys conference, the most important meeting in the Statistical Physics area. This year’s venue is Genova, Italy. The program can be downloaded from the conference site. Giovanni Gallavotti and Kurt Binder are receiving the Boltzmann Medal this year.
There are a lot of talks about applications of SP methods in interdisplinary areas as Economphysics, Information Theory and Biology. Interestingly, there are no talks about QFT or Quantum Gravity. There is a talk to be given by M. Caselle entitled “String theory description of the interface free energy”. It is not exactly about String Theory, but seems a very interesting application of its formalism to a Statistical Physics problem. The abstract is:
A powerful tool to describe the physics of interfaces is the well known “capillary wave” model. It was realized a few years ago that this model is nothing else that the long range limit of the bosonic Nambu-Goto string theory. An interesting open problem is to understand if real interfaces are described by the whole NG theory or only by its capillary wave limit. The two expressions only coincide at the first order in the 1/(\sigma)A expansion (\sigma being the interface tension and A the interface area). By using standard covariant quantization of the bosonic string, we were able to derive an exact expression for the Nambu-Goto expectation for the interface free energy as a function of the geometry of the interface. We then compared our predictions with a set of very accurate Monte Carlo data for the interface free energy in the 3d Ising model. The Nambu-Goto result turns out to describe the data much better than the simple capillary wave model in a large range of values of the interface area thus making interfaces one of the most effective realization of string inspired models in nature.
The related paper is in arXiv: The partition function of interfaces from the Nambu-Goto effective string theory. I haven’t read the paper yet, but I’ll try to do that and comment it when possible.
Unfortunately, I cannot go this year. Maybe next one…
