Nematic liquid crystal phase in a system of interacting dimers

Series
Math Physics Seminar
Time
Tuesday, November 28, 2017 - 1:00pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Ian Jauslin – IAS, Princeton – jauslin@ias.edu
Organizer
Federico Bonetto
In 1979, O. Heilmann and E.H. Lieb introduced an interacting dimer model with the goal of proving the emergence of a nematic liquid crystal phase in it. In such a phase, dimers spontaneously align, but there is no long range translational order. Heilmann and Lieb proved that dimers do, indeed, align, and conjectured that there is no translational order. I will discuss a recent proof of this conjecture. This is joint work with Elliott H. Lieb.