Prof. Alessandro Pelizzola

• Lecture notes and slides will be provided.

Argomenti del programma: Kinetics of phase transitions: thermodynamics of interfaces, metastability and classical nucleation theory, domain coarsening, phase ordering with or without conservation laws (12 hours). Introduction to molecular biology: the cell; small molecules; proteins and nucleic acids. (4 hours).

• J.P. Sethna, Entropy, order parameters and complexity, Clarendon
• Lecture notes and slides will be provided.

Argomenti del programma: 1. Statistical physics Review: canonical and grand-canonical ensembles, non-interacting systems (10 hours). The Ising model: introduction and exact solutions in one dimension and on the fully connected graph (10 hours). Mean-field approximation (10 hours). Beyond mean-field approximation: Bethe-Peierls and belief propagation (5 hours).