Universality Classes for Extreme Value Statistics

Abstract

The low temperature physics of disordered systems is governed by the statistics of extremely low energy states. It is thus rather important to discuss the possible universality classes for extreme value statistics. We compare the usual probabilistic classification to the results of the replica approach. We show in detail that one class of independent variables corresponds exactly to the so-called one step replica symmetry breaking solution in the replica language. This universality class holds if the correlations are sufficiently weak. We discuss the relation between the statistics of extremes and the problem of Burgers turbulence in decay.