Konwersatorium im. Leopolda Infelda

Remarkable progress has been made in the statistical physics of disordered systems in the last three decades. A system can be disordered either because each particle (or spin, or neuron, or economic agent...) is different from all other ones, or because it sees a differentenvironment: generally this happens in a glassy phase, in which the various particles freeze in some positions which look random, and don't have the periodicity of a crystal. In these cases, it turns out to be very difficult to even understand the basics of the collective behaviour, such as the phase diagram. This field has been one of the main developments of statistical physics, starting with spin glass theory. Offsprings developed gradually towards such diverse systems as combinatorial optimization problems, error correcting codes, neural networks, structural glasses, or systems of interacting economic agents with heteronegeous strategies. Recently, I have started to consider the vast potentialities offered by cross fertilizations between the field of Statistical Physics and that of Information Theory, which I will develop throughout my conference.