Mini-Symposium: Entropy Methods in Statistical Mechanics

Thursday 29 - Friday 30 November 2007

 

Program

Each talk will include 5 to 10 minutes of question and discussion time, at the speaker's discretion.

	Thursday 29 November Venue; ICT Theatre 2	Friday 30 November NB Venue: AMSI seminar room
8:45 - 9:15	Registration	Registration
9:15 - 10:10	Keynote: Denis Evans (ANU) Nonlinear response theory and the fluctuation theorem	Keynote: Ian Snook (RMIT) Some uses and abuses of entropy, or 'A funny thing happened on the way to equilibrium'
10:10 - 10:40	Iwan Jensen (Melbourne) Role of pulling direction in understanding the energy landscape of proteins	Peter Daivis (RMIT) Reversible and irreversible work in viscoelastic deformation
10:40 - 11:00	Morning Tea	Morning Tea
11:00 - 11:30	Nathan Clisby (Melbourne) Fast algorithms for self-avoiding walks	Bill van Megen (RMIT) First order freezing transition in a system of hard spheres: an explanation without recourse to entropy
11:30 - 12:00	Jarek Krawczyk (Melbourne) Simulations of single chain polymer: FlatPERM	Bill van Megen (continued)
12:00 - 12:30	Robert Parviainen (Melbourne) A constant term that solves many asymmetric exclusion process problems	Salvy Russo (RMIT) Calculation of entropy and free energy in defected crystals using Abinitio Lattice Dynamics
12:30 - 1:45	Lunch	Lunch
1:45 - 2:40	Keynote: Tony Guttmann (Melbourne) Prudent self-avoiding walks and polygons	Keynote: Denis Evans (ANU) The fluctuation theorem
2:40 - 3:10	Frank den Hollander (Leiden) A quenched large deviation principle for words in a letter sequence	Stephen Williams (ANU) Statistical mechanics of nonergodic solids
3:10 - 3:40	Shantilal Goradia Entropy, ALPHA, Hubble Time, and dark energy, linked?	Ian Enting (Melbourne) Lattice statistical studies of massless phases
3:40 - 4:00	Afternoon tea	Afternoon tea

Keynote speakers

DENIS EVANS FAA is Dean of the Research School of Chemistry at the Australian National University. His research interests are liquid state chemical physics; nonequilibrium statistical mechanics; dynamical systems theory as applied to bulk systems; irreversible thermodynamics; computer simulation algorithms; the relation of the intermolecular potential function to macroscopic fluid properties; molecular rheology.

He was awarded the 2004 Moyal Medal by Macquarie University for distinguished contributions to mathematics, physics or statistics and received the 2003 Centenary Medal from the Australian government.

TONY GUTTMANN was the Interim Director of AMSI upon its foundation, and is currently Director of MASCOS, a Past President of the AustMS, and an organiser of the BHP Billiton/University of Melbourne School Mathematics Competition. His research interests are in mathematical models of phase transitions, enumerative combinatorics and critical phenomena in general.

IAN SNOOK took his degree, honours and PhD at the University of Tasmania, following which he was a postdoctoral fellow at RSC, ANU. He joined RMIT in 1973, and became full professor in 1995.

Visiting positions: IBM Research Laboratory, San Jose, USA, Ceramics Processing Research Laboratory, MIT, Boston, Massachusetts, USA, Physics Department, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA, Solid State Physics Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, USA, Mathematics Institute, Odense University, Odense, Denmark, Atomic Simulation Group, Department of Mathematics and Physics, The Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland
and Soft Condensed Matter and Condensed Matter Groups, Institute of Physics, Johanas Gutenberg University, Mainz Germany.

Ian has published about 160 papers, 9 book chapters and 1 book. He has supervised about 20 PhD students. His current research interests arecomputer simulation of condensed matter, quantum mechanical calculation of interaction energies, modelling nanoparticles' structure and formation mechanisms.

 

Organising committee

Prof. Philip Broadbridge, AMSI
Prof. Tony Guttmann, MASCOS

More information

Email Tony Guttmann, MASCOS, at

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