Speaker
Description
Kinetically constrained models (KCM) are reversible interacting particle systems with continuous time Markov dynamics of Glauber type, which have been extensively used in the physics literature to model the liquid-glass transition, a major and longstanding open problem in condensed matter physics. They also represent a natural stochastic (and non-monotone) counterpart of the family of cellular automata known as $\cal U$-bootstrap percolation thoroughly analyzed by P. Balister, B.Bollobas, H. Duminil-Copin, R. Morris, P. Smith and A. Uzzell. I shall present a series of universality results for the mean infection time of the origin for KCM, which have been obtained in various collaborations with C. Toninelli, L. Mareche', I. Hartarski and R. Morris.
