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Center for Nonlinear Studies |
| 2008 Kac Lecture Series March 17-19, 2008 |
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Guest Lecturer Professor Michael E. Fisher Distinguished University Professor and Regents Professor Institute for Physical Science and Technology University of Maryland |
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| Lecture Schedule: | ||
(View .pdf poster) Ludwig Boltzmann died by his own hand 101 years ago last September. He was a passionate believer in atoms: underlying thermodynamics, he felt, lay a statistical world governed by the mechanics of individual particles. His struggles against critics — "Have you ever seen an atom?" taunted Ernst Mach — left him pessimistic. Nevertheless, following Maxwell and clarified by Gibbs, he established the science of Statistical Mechanics. But today, especially granted our understanding of critical singularities and their universality, how much do atomic particles and their charged partners, ions, really matter? The answers we have also met opposition. But Boltzmann would have welcomed the insights gained and approved of applications of statistical dynamics to biology, sociology, and other enterprises. |
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(View .pdf poster) In a primitive model electrolyte or hard-sphere plasma with charges q+=-zq how does, z, the valency of the ions, affect the critical temperature and density? What trends should be expected? It turns out that while a field theoretic perturbative calculation errs badly, careful simulations answer the question numerically. But how can one understand the answer? Basic, concrete physicochemical ideas going back to Debye and Hückel, and to Bjerrum when implemented — which proves not so easy — provide insights which seem to capture the essentials. And they also reveal the interfacial Galvani potential that builds up between two coexisting phases and vanishes as criticality is approached. |
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(View .pdf poster)
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