Pancharatnam Lecture

Stochastic Resetting

Speaker: Satya Majumdar (LPTMS, University of Paris-Saclay, France )

Date and time
Webinar link
RRI YouTube Live Link
Venue
RRI Auditorium

Abstract

In this talk, I aim to give a pedagogical overview of the rapidly developing field of `stochastic resetting', relevant in many fields that typically involve a random search process. Stochastic resetting simply means interrupting the natural dynamics of a system at random times and reset the system back to its initial condition. This resetting move breaks  detailed balance and drives the system into a nonequilibrium stationary state. The approach to the stationary state is accompanied by an unusual ‘dynamical phase transition’. Moreover,  the mean first-passage time to a fixed target becomes a minimum at an optimal value of the resetting rate. This makes the diffusive search process more efficient. Recent experiments in optical traps have verified some of the theoretical predictions, but also have raised new interesting questions. Going beyond the classical regime, there have been recent developments in quantum resetting also. I hope to explain why stochastic resetting has emerged in recent years as an exciting field of research in nonequilibrium statistical physics. 

Panchratnam Poster

Satya N. Majumdar got his PhD in Physics in 1992 from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay, India. He did postdocs at AT&T Bell Labs (1993-1994) and Yale University (1995-1996). He was a faculty at Tata Institute (1997-1999) and was appointed as a CNRS scientist in 2000. Since 2004, he is at LPTMS (Université Paris-Saclay) as a CNRS Research Director. He is also an adjunct professor at the Tata Institute (Mumbai, India), Weizmann Institute (Rehovot, Israel), assocaite at the Higgs Centre of the University of Edinburgh, and a VAJRA-SERB fellow at the Raman Research Institute (Bangalore, India).He has served as a divisional associate editor of Physical Review Letters (2011-2013) and as a member of the editorial board of J. Phys. A, J. Stat. Mech. and J. Stat. Phys. He is a recipient of several national and international prizes including the Paul Langevin medal (2005) of the French Physical Society, Excellence award by the Tata Institute Alumni
Association (2009), European Physical Society (EPS) prize for Statistical and Nonlinear physics (2019), CNRS silver medal (2019) and the Gay Lussac-Humboldt prize (2019).
He has worked in a broad area of equilibrium and non-equilibrium statistical physics, including sandpile models and granular materials, transport in superconductors, phase ordering dynamics in out of equilibrium systems, persistence and first-passage properties in stochastic processes, interface growth problems, extreme value statistics, search problems in ecology and computer science, Brownian motion, active particles, random matrix theory and cold atoms.