Phasenübergänge

Abstract

This workshop, as an established intention, brings together different groups working on phase transitions. Mathematicians working in statistical mechanics, and others working in PDE and continuum mechanics met with physicists with a strong experimental background. There were many younger participants, and they specifically stated that this workshop gave them an excellent opportunity for contact with the fields different from their own. There was a wide range of subjects presented in the talks and also in the discussion groups, with an emphasis on free energies, scalings and microstructures. The modelling aspect was very important always with the aim to get rigorous results, describe qualitative behaviour and the relationship between different classes of models in precise terms, e.g. via singular perturbation theory. This meant that the discussion of mathematical technical tools, many inspired by phase transition problems, played a large role in the workshop.