In this talk, I will start by introducing spin systems on the lattice Z^d. I will then focus mainly on spin systems whose underlying symmetry is continuous (as opposed to the celebrated Ising model whose symmetry sigma->-sigma is discrete). The goal of this talk will be to explain a surprising link which appeared recently between these models in statistical physics and questions in Bayesian statistics / statistical reconstruction. I will introduce a new way to identify long-range-order in these spins systems with continuous symmetry (also called "symmetry breaking") which is based on the concept of "group synchronization" and relies in particular on a recent work by Abbe, Massoulié, Montanari, Sly and Srivastava (2018).
The talk will not require any background in statistical physics. This is a joint work with Thomas Spencer (IAS, Princeton).