Scaling limits and universality of Ising and dimer models

Abstract

After having introduced the notion of universality in statistical mechanics and its importance for our comprehension of the macroscopic behavior of interacting systems, I review recent progress in the understanding of the scaling limit of lattice critical models, including a quantitative characterization of the limiting distribution and the robustness of the limit under perturbations of the microscopic Hamiltonian. Specifically, I focus on two classes of non-exactly-solvable two-dimensional systems: nonplanar Ising models and interacting dimers. In both settings, I describe the conjectures on the expected structure of the scaling limit, review the progress towards their proof, and state some of the recent results on the universality of the limit, which I contributed to. Finally, I outline the ideas and methods involved in the proofs, describe some of the perspectives opened by these results, and propose several open problems.