Dear all, On Monday, February 10th, at 14h00 in Aula Dal Passo of Tor Vergata Math Department, RoMaDS <https://www.mat.uniroma2.it/~rds/events.php> will host a double seminar by Alexandre Stauffer (King's College London) and Jacopo Borga (MIT). See below for titles and abstracts. We encourage in-person partecipation. Should you be unable to come, here is the link to the Teams streaming: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3arfsL73KX-fw86y1YnXq2nk5VnZFwPU-iIPEmqet8NCg1%40thread.tacv2/1738745510265?context={"Tid"%3a"24c5be2a-d764-40c5-9975-82d08ae47d0e"%2c"Oid"%3a"650fc4a8-4cec-4bd2-87bc-90d134074fe6"} <https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3arfsL73KX-fw86y1YnXq2nk5VnZFwPU-iIPEmqet8NCg1%40thread.tacv2/1738745510265?context={%22Tid%22%3a%2224c5be2a-d764-40c5-9975-82d08ae47d0e%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22650fc4a8-4cec-4bd2-87bc-90d134074fe6%22}> The seminars are part of the Excellence Project MatMod@TOV. TALK 1 Alexandre Stauffer (King's College London) “Non-monotone phase transition in interacting particle systems” In this talk we will discuss a reaction-diffusion particle system which has a non-monotone phase transition. I will explain the techniques used to analyze monotone models and how they can be refined to analyze non-monotone particle systems. Based on upcoming works with Leandro Chiarini and Tom Finn. TALK 2 Jacopo Borga (MIT) “Lattice Yang-Mills theory in the large N limit via sums over surfaces" Abstract: Lattice Yang-Mills theories are important models in particle physics. They are defined on the d-dimensional lattice Z^d using a group of matrices of dimension N, and Wilson loop expectations are the fundamental observables of these theories. Recently, Cao, Park, and Sheffield showed that Wilson loop expectations can be expressed as sums over certain embedded bipartite maps of any genus. Building on this novel approach, we prove in the so-called strongly coupled regime: - A rigorous formula in terms of embedded bipartite planar maps of Wilson loop expectations in the large N limit, in any dimension d. - An exact computation of Wilson loop expectations in the large N limit, in dimension d=2, for a large family of (simple and non-simple) loops. Previous results to the two aforementioned points were previously established by Chatterjee (2019) and Basu & Ganguly (2016), respectively. Our results extend these previous results, offer simpler proofs and provide a new perspective on these significant quantities. This work is a collaboration with Sky Cao and Jasper Shogren-Knaak.