STARTING SHORTLY: Invitation to ICTP Colloquium by Prof. Bo Persson on "The Physics of Contact and Adhesion with application to biological systems" at 17:00 hrs in Budinich Lecture Hall

[Infopoint]

ICTP is pleased to announce that the forthcoming ICTP Colloquium by 
Prof. Bo Persson on "The Physics of Contact and Adhesion with 
application to biological systems" will take place *TODAY***_*at 17:00 
hrs*_, in the Budinich Lecture Hall, Leonardo Building, ICTP.

*
Biosketch: *Prof. Bo Persson obtained his PhD in theoretical physics 
from Chalmers Technical University 1980. His thesis advisor was Prof. 
Stig Lundqvist, one of the founders of condensed matter at ICTP. He is 
currently working at the Peter Gruenberg Institute of the Research 
Center Juelich, part of Germany’s Helmholtz Association. Besides several 
years as a visiting scientist at IBM research laboratories, in Yorktown 
Heights and in Zurich, he spent numerous periods as a visiting scientist 
in research laboratories in Israel, Japan, China, Italy, and elsewhere. 
After his initial research work in dynamical processes at surfaces, he 
turned around 1995 to theoretical tribology (friction, adhesion, contact 
mechanics). He has published more that 400 articles in international 
journals, and is the author of "Sliding Friction: Physical Principles 
and Applications" (Springer, first edition 1997) and co-author (with 
Prof. A. Volokitin) on "Electromagnetic Fluctuations at the Nanoscale: 
Theory and Applications" (Springer, 2017), besides the early book (with 
E. Tosatti) “Physics of Sliding Friction (Kluwer 1996) collecting papers 
of the very first ICTP Research Workshop on the subject in 1995.
Besides his primary research activity at PGI, Bo Persson is the founder 
and CEO of MultiscaleConsulting, a company involved in consulting 
(theory and experiment) on topics related to contact mechanics and 
friction (see www.MultiscaleConsulting.com). Most clients are from the 
tire industry, two F1-racing teams (rubber friction and tire dynamics), 
and medical companies (the contact between the rubber stopper and the 
barrel in syringes).

*Abstract: *One of the weakest forces in Nature is the van der Waals 
interaction which acts between all atoms and solids. Still on a 
macroscopic level this force field is very strong: one can theoretically 
hang an object with the weight of a car using a solid bar with 1 square 
cm cross section attached by the van der Waals interaction to a flat 
surface. This is never observed in reality, and in my presentation, I 
will explain the origin of this "adhesion paradox". I will also show how 
some animals, like the gecko or tree frog, have "learned" (via natural 
selection) to make use of these weak force fields to adhere to rough and 
contaminated surfaces, where traditional adhesives would fail. I will 
describe the origin of adhesion hysteresis, and present some 
experimental results illustrating it. All solid objects have surface 
roughness which often is fractal-like, sometimes extending from the size 
of the solid object to atomic distances. I will describe a theory which 
can be used to study the contact between two elastic solids with surface 
roughness and adhesion. The theory predicts the contact area and the 
stress probability distribution, as well as the probability distribution 
of interfacial separations, and is the basis for a huge number of 
practical applications like rubber friction, adhesion, the heat and 
electric contact resistance, leakage of rubber seals, conveyor belts, 
tire dynamics etc. It describes how the contact between two solid 
objects changes as the interface is studied with increasing 
magnification, say from the naked-eye level to atomic resolution. The 
theory will be illustrated with applications to the human skin, to 
electroadhesion for haptic touchscreens (involving the finger-glass 
screen contact), and adhesive pads for robotics.

Information is available at: http://indico.ictp.it/event/9069/

The Colloquium will be livestreamed at:  ictp.it/livestream

Light refreshments will be served after the talk.

You are all very warmly invited to attend.

With best regards,

Office of the Director, ICTP


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