Schedule(old)

Courses will be held in rooms 131 (CM courses) and 132 (SBP courses). The Coordinator will inform you of any room change when necessary.

Basic courses (compulsory)

Preliminary timetable (link to printable version in PDF or ODS format)

Optional courses

Lectures on “Disordered Quantum Systems”

Prof. Giuseppe Santoro will hold a short course on “Disordered Quantum Systems” during the months of March and April.

Lectures on “Many Body Physics out of Equilibrium”

The course is held by Dott. Alessandro Silva, who will follow the program below:

1. Why a non-equilibrium field theory is needed: failure of the fluctuation dissipation theorem, entropy production, and the Gell-Mann Low conjecture.
2. Open non-equilibrium systems: Keldysh Green’s functions, nonequilibrium distributions, Quantum kinetic equations and the Boltzmann limit.
3. Applications to transport in nanostructures: current-voltage characteristics in interacting quantum dots, adiabatic quantum pumping.
4. Closed non-equilibrium systems: quantum quenches, entropy production, statistics of the work, Jarzinsky equalities and Tasaki-Crooks fluctuation theorems.
5. Applications to quantum critical systems: the Kibble-Zurek mechanism for defect production, scaling, quenches through quantum critical points and exact solution for the Ising model

Courses in common with Statistical and Biological Physics

A short course on “Advanced sampling techniques for numerical simulations” will be held by Alessandro Laio, starting February/March 2011, in 10 lectures (2 per week) of about 2 hours each. Another course on “Simulation of Biomolecules” will be held by Giovanni Bussi.

Advanced Sampling Techniques, course program:

• General introduction to the “rare events” problem.
  Introduction to the concepts of free energy, rate constant, mean-first-passage time, separation of time scales, committor distribution, etc.
• Computing the free energy in complex systems:
  1. Thermodynamic integration and umbrella sampling techniques. Ferrenberg and Swendsen method for computing the density of states and weighted-histogram analysis.
  2. Free energies from non-equilibrium processes: the Jarzynski equality for the irreversible work.
  3. History-dependent reconstruction of the free energy: metadynamics and Wand-Landau sampling.
• Techniques for computing the rate constants:
  1. Classical transition state theory. Kramers theory and Bennett-Chandler method for computing the recrossing corrections.
  2. Methods for finding the saddle point in complex potential energy surfaces: nudged elastic band, eigenvalue following and the dimer method.
  3. Path integral formulation of the rare event problem: transition path sampling. Methods for computing the committor distribution (finite-temperature string, etc.).

Simulation of Biomolecules, course program:

• Classical force fields.
• Equations of motion and integration schemes
• Molecular dynamics in various ensembles.
• Microreversibility, Crooks and Jarzinski fluctuation theorems.
• Selected topics on molecular dynamics.

Other Activities of interest

• Seminars on “Disorder and strong electron correlations” (ICTP main bldg, seminar room). Check the Agenda on ICTP website.
• Joint ICTP/SISSA Statistical Physics seminars: Wed 16:30 (ICTP main bldg, seminar room).
• Seminars @ Elettra: check the homepage of Theory@Elettra group.