Alice Guionnet, Ph.D.

Alice Guionnet has done very important work on the statistical mechanics of disordered systems (and in particular the dynamics and aging of spin glasses), random matrices (with an emphasis on the combinatorics of maps), and operator algebra/free probability. Her work on large deviations for spectra of random matrices has been very influential. She has extended the large deviation principle to the context of Voiculescu’s free probability theory, and in collaboration with Cabanal-Duvillard, Capitaine, and Biane she proved various large deviation bounds in this more general setting. These bounds enabled her to prove an inequality between the two notions of free entropy given by Voiculescu, settling half of the most important question in the field. With her former students M. Maida and E. Maurel-Segala and more recently with Vaughan Jones and D. Shlyakhtenko, Guionnet has studied statistical mechanics on random graphs through multimatrix models. Their work on the general Potts models on random graphs branches out in promising directions within operator algebra theory. Guionnet resigned her Investigatorship in 2016 to move to the École normale supérieure de Lyon in France.