[Sci-all-l] Physics Talk Tomorrow

[davollbach at vassar.edu]

Hi everyone,

Just wanted to give everyone a heads up about a great talk tomorrow. It
should be a good one, we hope to see you all there.

Dave Vollbach
Physics/Astronomy majors committee co chair

Guest Speaker: -- J.S. Wettlaufer
Professor of Geophysics and Physics at Yale University
When: Friday, November 3rd, 2006
Time: 3:00-4:30pm
Sanders Physics Room 207
"Melting Below Zero"

The surface of ice exhibits the swath of phase transition phenomena common
to all materials and as such it acts as an ideal test bed of both theory
and experiment.  It is readily available, transparent, optically
bifrefringent and probing it in the laboratory does not require cryogenics
or ultra high vacuum apparatus.  Systematic study reveals the range of
critical phenomena, equilibrium and non-equilibrium phase transitions and,
most relevant to this talk, pre-melting, traditionally studied in more
simply bound solids.   While this makes ice as a material appealing from
the perspective of the physicist, its ubiquity and importance in the
natural environment makes ice compelling to a broad range of disciplines
in the earth and planetary sciences.  I describe the physics of the
pre-melting of ice, its relationship with other materials more familiar to
the condensed matter community and then we develop a number of the many
tendrils of the basic phenomena as they play out on land, in the oceans
and throughout the atmosphere.