Regensburg 2004 – scientific programme

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DY: Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 20: Fractals and Nonlinearity I

DY 20.1: Invited Talk

Tuesday, March 9, 2004, 09:30–10:00, H2

Statistical Physics for Complex Cosmic Structures — •Luciano Pietronero — Dipartimento di Fisica, Universita’ di Roma La Sapienza, 00185 - Roma, Italy

The amount of data in the field of astrophysics is growing exponentially since a few years and it will grow even more in the future. This situation is producing a dramatic change in which many speculations and conjectures can finally be tested. This large amount of data permits the detailed application of concepts from modern statistical physics. For the galaxy distribution these led to a new general perspective and, in particular, we presented strong evidence for self-similar and fractal structures extending to the limits of the data. This led to a large debate in the field which is nicely described in the recent book: “Discovery of Cosmic Fractals” by Y. Baryshev and P. Tirikorpi (World Scientific, 2002) http://www.wspc.com/books/popsci/4896.html. Recently we have extended the applications of these methods also to the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (which is very smooth) and to the N-body simularions (which should link the two properties). We provide an overview of the general situation of a field which represents an ideal playground of interdisciplinary research between astrophysics and statistical physics.