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This is the website for the applied statistical mechanics seminar
at BU. The seminar takes place Wednesdays at 3:30pm-5pm in SCI 352 .
The goal of the seminar is to explore how statistical mechanics can be used to understand physical phenomena across the full breadth of complex systems (quantum, biological, soft matter, machine learning, etc.).
To facilitate communication across fields, we have adopted a unique format for the seminar:
1. A 30 minute pedagogical tutorial geared toward an inter-disciplinary audience of theorists.
2. A 20 minute research talk and questions.
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SPRING 2026
January 28, 2026 - Kedar Damle, TIFR
Talk: Vacancy-induced local moment instability of short-range RVB spin liquids on triangular and kagome lattices (Regular Seminar)
February 4, 2026 - Pankaj Mehta, BU
Tutorial: Introduction to Ecology and Cavity Method
Talk : Chaos in high-dimensional ecosystems.
February 11, 2026 - Dries Sels, BU
Tutorial: Cavity Method, Belief Propagation, and Tensor Networks
Talk: TBD
February 18, 2026 - TBD
Tutorial: TBD
Talk: TBD
February 25, 2026 Timour Ichmoukhamedov, NYU
Tutorial: Path integrals, Feynman-Kac, Jensen-Feynman
Talk: Reinforcement learning for path integrals
March 4, 2026 Flaviano Morone, NYU
Tutorial: Mean-field spin glasses, Franz-Parisi potentials
Talk: Metastability in the SYK model
March 11, 2026 - March Meeting Practice Talk
March 25, 2026 - Coraline Tao, URI
Tutorial:A Phase-Space Approach to Adiabatic Gauge Potential in Molecular Motion
Talk: (see above)
Abstract: Molecular dynamics is canonically formulated as nuclear motion in a parameterized electronic space (i.e. on potential energy surfaces) within the Born–Oppenheimer (BO) framework. This naturally gives rise to the adiabatic gauge potential (AGP), or derivative couplings, as part of the geometric structure underlying molecular motion. In the tutorial, I will begin with the well-known component of the AGP that governs nonadiabatic transitions and scales inversely with the energy gap. I will then turn to the less-discussed part of the AGP, which can influence dynamics and spectroscopic responses even on a single BO surface, highlighting the need to incorporate AGP in molecular electronic structure beyond the canonical BO approximation. In the following seminar, I will introduce an alternative phase-space approach that recovers the important missing components of the AGP by enforcing exact symmetry constraints. I will demonstrate our approach with ab initio studies of vibrational optical activity and spin–Coriolis-type effects.
April 1, 2026 Bernardo Barrera, BU
Tutorial: Non-adiabatic dynamics beyond the Born-Oppenheimer Approximation:
Talk: Non-adiabatic dynamics beyond the Born-Oppenheimer Approximation
Abstract: In the tutorial part of this talk, I will discuss a simple model of a spinful particle moving in a spatially varying magnetic field. We will use this toy model to illustrate (1) the Born–Oppenheimer approximation (BOA), (2) some of the early corrections developed by Born, Huang, and Berry, and (3) the conditions under which it breaks down.
In the second part, I will introduce a framework to systematically improve the BOA. Using this framework, we will be able to understand non-adiabatic phenomena including: the renormalization of the particle’s effective mass, motion-induced interactions, and the generation of spin squeezing and entanglement through motion.
April 8, 2026 - Andre Grossi Fonseca , MIT
Tutorial: Exact diagonalization on the lattice: a window into quantum many-body physics
Talk:Ground-state search as an optimization problem
Abstract:A central goal in quantum many-body physics has been to identify microscopic models that realize new phases of matter. In the first part of this talk, we will discuss a simple 1D lattice model hosting distinct quantum phases, for which we will discuss emergent collective phenomena and delineate the phase diagram. Our goal will be to gain intuition through simple arguments and diagrams for how strongly correlated systems can be exactly solved for a few particles, both numerically and analytically. In the second part of this talk, we introduce a systematic approach for targeted, gradient-based phase discovery. Given a phase of interest, we define a “target-phase loss function”, which encodes sharp features of choice of the targeted quantum state. This replaces exhaustive phase search with a differentiable optimization problem in the space of Hamiltonian parameters. The method is broadly applicable to a wide range of symmetry-broken and topological orders and can be interfaced with most numerical solvers. We demonstrate our method in action across diverse settings, including charge-density waves and fractional quantum Hall states. No background in many-body physics will be assumed.
April 15, 2026 Liam Fitzpatrick, BU
Tutorial: The Fuzzy Sphere Regulator for Many-Body Systems at Criticality
Talk:Fuzzy Sphere Conformal Generators
Abstract:We introduce how the fuzzy sphere regulator arises by taking the lowest Landau level (LLL) of non-relativistic fermions on a sphere with constant normal magnetic flux. We describe in what sense this constitutes a short-distance regulator, with the key property that spherical symmetry is exactly preserved. Focusing on the 3d Ising model, we discuss adding interactions to the LLL to tune to the critical point, and how the state-operator correspondence in conformal field theory can be used to extract the spectrum of local operators in 3d Ising. We show how the generators of the emergent conformal algebra can be constructed by a matching procedure between operators in the UV and the IR. If time permits, we will also explain how these generators can be used to significant reduce uncertainties from finite size effects in the calculation of conformal data.
April 22, 2026 Huan Souza
Tutorial: TBD
Talk: TBD
April 29, 2026 - TBD
Tutorial: TBD
Talk: TBD
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