Arbeitsgemeinschaft: Percolation

Abstract

Abstract. Percolation as a mathematical theory is more than fifty years old. During its life, it has attracted the attention of both physicists and mathematicians. This is due in large part to the fact that it represents one of the simplest examples of a statistical mechanical model undergoing a phase transition, and that several interesting results can be obtained rigorously. In recent years the interest in percolation has spread even further, following the introduction by Oded Schramm of the Schramm-Loewner Evolution (SLE) and a theorem by Stanislav Smirnov showing the conformal invariance of the continuum scaling limit of two-dimensional critical percolation. These results establish a new, powerful and mathematically rigorous, link between lattice-based statistical mechanical models and conformally invariant models in the plane, studied by physicists under the name of Conformal Field Theory (CFT). The Arbeitsgemeinschaft on percolation has attracted more than thirty participants, most of them young researchers, from several countries in Europe, North America, and Brazil. The main focus has been on recent developments, but several classical results have also been presented.