Supervisor: Alessandro Pelizzola
The research activity of prof. Pelizzola's group now focuses mainly on non-equilibrium statistical mechanics (NESM). NESM, in spite of being relevant for many real-world phenomena, currently lacks a complete theory, at odds with its equilibrium counterpart. In NESM, the natural extension of the equilibrium state is the non-equilibrium steady state (NESS), and a large part of the research activity in NESM is currently devoted to understand NESSs, in the search of general principles governing them.
We investigate the properties of NESSs, and how they are approached in time, in a class of paradigmatic models (named exclusion processes, or more generally driven diffusive systems), inspired by vehicular and biological traffic. We employ a wide spectrum of methods, including both semi-analytical (cluster approximations) and numerical (kinetic Monte Carlo simulations, exact solutions of finite size systems).
A PhD student willing to join our group is expected to have talent and motivation for theoretical physics, and preferably some background in statistical physics.
Recent publications:
[1] A. Pelizzola, Variational approximations for stationary states of Ising-like models, Eur. Phys. J. B 86, 120 (2013); arXiv:1307.6684
[2] A. Pelizzola and M. Pretti, Variational approximations for stochastic dynamics on graphs, J. Stat. Mech. 073406 (2017); arXiv:1702.06822
[3] A. Pelizzola and M. Pretti, Cluster approximations for the TASEP: stationary state and dynamical transition, Eur. Phys. J. B 90, 183 (2017); arXiv:1710.10873.
[4] D. Botto, A. Pelizzola and M. Pretti, Dynamical transitions in a driven diffusive model with interactions, EPL 124, 50004 (2018).
[5]D. Botto, A. Pelizzola, M. Pretti and M. Zamparo, Dynamical transition in the TASEP with Langmuir kinetics: mean-field theory ,J. Phys. A: Math. Theor. 52, 045001 (2019); arXiv:1809.03231