Soft Matter and Complex Systems Seminar

The statistical behaviour of the largest eigenvalue of a random hermitian matrix with independent entries is governed by the so-called Tracy-Widom distribution. It turns out that the latter appears in quite a few problems in physics, notably in the context of the KPZ equation. Moreover, the Tracy-Widom distribution has been recently realised experimentally in growing interfaces of turbulent liquid crystal. In my talk I will try to give a pedagogical introduction to this topic, mostly in the context of Random Matrix Theory.