The 2026 edition of the traditional Boltzmann Lecture will be held on Monday, February 23rd, at 14:00, in Room 128–129. The lecture is organized by the Statistical Physics group at SISSA, close to Boltzmann’s birthday, to commemorate a founding figure of statistical physics.
Professor Michele Caselle (Department of Physics, University of Turin and INFN) will give a seminar titled Physics of Interfaces in the Three-Dimensional Ising Model.
Abstract:
The Ising model is a cornerstone of Statistical Mechanics. It is the paradigmatic example of spontaneous symmetry breaking at low temperatures and lies at the crossroads of several important branches of modern theoretical physics, ranging from Quantum Field Theory to the physics of disordered systems and even string theory.
In this talk, after a pedagogical introduction to the main physical properties of the model, I discuss the physics of defects in its broken-symmetry phase, with a particular attention to interfaces. I will show that results and ideas from apparently distant fields, such as confining gauge theories and effective string models, can be used to precisely fit both the interface free energy and the low-temperature spectrum of the Ising model.
Monte Carlo simulations play a central role in these studies. If time permits, in the final part of the talk I will also discuss recent advances in simulation methods that enable high precision determinations of free energy differences in statistical mechanics models by combining non-equilibrium Monte Carlo sampling with machine-learning flows, within the framework of so-called Stochastic Normalizing Flow (SNF) algorithms.
Michele Caselle is a full professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Turin. A theoretical physicist by training, he has long been interested in statistical mechanics and in the physics of complex systems. In 2009, he contributed to the establishment of a Master’s degree program in Physics of Complex Systems (one of the first in Italy) and has served as its President since 2023. During the same period, he also participated in the creation of a PhD program entitled Complex Systems for Quantitative Biomedicine, which he coordinated from 2008 to 2013