Basic Understanding of Condensed Phases of Matter via Packing Models

Packing problems have been a source of fascination for millenia and their study has produced a rich literature that spans numerous disciplines. Investigations of hard-particle packing models have provided basic insights into the structure and bulk properties of condensed phases of matter, including low-temperature states (e.g., molecular and colloidal liquids, crystals and glasses), multiphase heterogeneous media, granular media, and biological systems. The densest packings are of great interest in pure mathematics, including discrete geometry and number theory. This perspective reviews pertinent theoretical and computational literature concerning the equilibrium, metastable and nonequilibrium packings of hard-particle packings in various Euclidean space dimensions. In the case of jammed packings, emphasis will be placed on the "geometric-structure" approach, which provides a powerful and unified means to quantitatively characterize individual packings via jamming categories and "order" maps. It incorporates extremal jammed states, including the densest packings, maximally random jammed states, and lowest-density jammed structures. Packings of identical spheres, spheres with a size distribution, and nonspherical particles are also surveyed. We close this review by identifying challenges and open questions for future research.Comment: 33 pages, 20 figures, Invited "Perspective" submitted to the Journal of Chemical Physics. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1008.298

The geometry of the Thurston metric: a survey

This paper is a survey about the Thurston metric on the Teichm\"uller space. The central issue is the constructions of extremal Lipschitz maps between hyperbolic surfaces. We review several constructions, including the original work of Thurston. Coarse geometry and isometry rigidity of the Thurston metric, relation between the Thurston metric and the Thurston compactification are discussed. Some recent generalizations and developments of the Thurston metric are sketched.Comment: 42 pages. This article will appear as a chapter in the book: In the tradition of Thurston, III (ed. K. Ohshika and A. Papadopoulos), Springer Verla

Zonotopes and four-dimensional superconformal field theories

The a-maximization technique proposed by Intriligator and Wecht allows us to determine the exact R-charges and scaling dimensions of the chiral operators of four-dimensional superconformal field theories. The problem of existence and uniqueness of the solution, however, has not been addressed in general setting. In this paper, it is shown that the a-function has always a unique critical point which is also a global maximum for a large class of quiver gauge theories specified by toric diagrams. Our proof is based on the observation that the a-function is given by the volume of a three dimensional polytope called "zonotope", and the uniqueness essentially follows from Brunn-Minkowski inequality for the volume of convex bodies. We also show a universal upper bound for the exact R-charges, and the monotonicity of a-function in the sense that a-function decreases whenever the toric diagram shrinks. The relationship between a-maximization and volume-minimization is also discussed.Comment: 29 pages, 15 figures, reference added, typos corrected, version published in JHE

Discrete Geometry (hybrid meeting)

A number of important recent developments in various branches of discrete geometry were presented at the workshop, which took place in hybrid format due to a pandemic situation. The presentations illustrated both the diversity of the area and its strong connections to other fields of mathematics such as topology, combinatorics, algebraic geometry or functional analysis. The open questions abound and many of the results presented were obtained by young researchers, confirming the great vitality of discrete geometry

Low Eigenvalues of Laplace and Schrödinger Operators

This workshop brought together researchers interested in eigenvalue problems for Laplace and Schr¨dinger operators. The main topics o of discussions and investigations covered Dirichlet and Neumann eigenvalue problems, inequalities for the spectral gap, isoperimertic problems and sharp Lieb–Thirring type inequalities. The focus included not only the analytic and geometric sides of the problems, but also related probabilistic and computational aspects

Discrete Geometry

[no abstract available

Buildings, Group Homology and Lattices

This is the author's PhD thesis, published at the Universit\"at M\"unster, Germany in 2010. It contains a detailed description of the results of arXiv:0903.1989, arXiv:0905.0071 and arXiv:0908.2713.Comment: 171 pages, PhD thesis, Universit\"at M\"unster, see http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:hbz:6-1748954938