3:30–4:30 pm Maria Goeppert-Mayer Lecture Hall
Bulk and Boundary Disorder Far From Thermal Equilibrium
Yariv Kafri, Technion
The influence of disorder on systems in thermal equilibrium is well understood. Depending on dimension and symmetries, quenched disorder in the bulk of the system can destroy bulk phase transitions and typically reduces correlations. Disorder localized along boundaries has no influence on the bulk. The colloquium will describe recent progress on the corresponding questions for active systems— a class of far-from-equilibrium systems. By first illustrating that active systems exhibit an anomalous, very non-Boltzmann behavior near external potentials, the response to a quenched disordered external potential will be described. Most striking, quenched disorder leads to generic scale-free correlations, and disorder which is localized along boundaries can destroy bulk phase transitions.