Speaker: 

Professor Eiras Rassoul-Agha

Institution: 

University of Utah

Time: 

Tuesday, January 13, 2009 - 11:00am

Location: 

RH 306

Consider a crystal formed of two types of atoms placed at the nodes of the
integer lattice. The type of each atom is chosen at random, but the crystal
is statistically shift-invariant. Consider next an electron hopping from atom
to atom. This electron performs a random walk on the integer lattice with
randomly chosen transition probabilities (since the configuration seen by
the electron is different at each lattice site). This process is highly
non-Markovian, due to the interaction between the walk and the
environment.

We will present a martingale approach to proving the invariance principle
(i.e. Gaussian fluctuations from the mean) for (irreversible) Markov chains
and show how this can be transferred to a result for the above process
(called random walk in random environment).

This is joint work with Timo Sepp\"al\"ainen.