CM seminar coming up

[CM ICTP - Trieste]

JOINT ICTP/SISSA CONDENSED MATTER SEMINARS
Academic Year 2005/06



SEMINAR ROOM - MAIN BUILDING   (first floor)



Friday, 26 May -     11:00 a.m.



M.A. ANISIMOV   ( University of Maryland, College Park )


" Mesoscopic thermodynamics and coupled ordering in soft matter "


	Abstract

Thermodynamics is a keystone in science and engineering, bridging the 
gap between  fundamentals and applications.  However, engineers often 
have to design processes and products where classical thermodynamics 
may become insufficient, e.g., strongly fluctuating and nanosize 
systems, or dissipative systems under conditions far away from 
equilibrium.  A new field, “mesoscopic thermodynamics” can be defined 
as a semi-phenomenological approach to the systems and phenomena in 
which a length - intermediate between the atomistic scale and the 
macroscopic scale - emerges and where such a length explicitly affects 
thermodynamic properties.  Finite-size effects and fluctuations, 
critical phenomena and spinodal decomposition, wetting and interfacial 
phenomena, self-organized criticality and guided self-assembly, 
thermodynamics of pattern formation and fractals are examples of the 
topics addressed in mesoscopic thermodynamics.  While conventional 
methods of statistical mechanics remain to be the fundamental 
background of mesoscopic thermodynamics, “coarse-grained” approaches, 
such as the Landau-Ginzburg local free-energy functional, can be 
successfully applied for describing apparently very different phenomena 
on mesoscales - from critical fluctuations to interfacial profiles, 
from porous media to micelles and microemulsions.  These approaches 
emphasize universality and utilize a number of powerful theoretical 
concepts, such as renormalization-group theory, finite-size scaling, 
and percolation theory.  A coupling between different order parameters 
is ubiquitous in soft matter.  At meso and nano scales, coupling 
between order parameters is associated with competition between 
different correlation lengths and may result in coupled dynamics of 
fluctuations.  As an example, I will discuss coupled mesoscopic 
dynamics (“avoided crossing”) caused by competition between mesoscales 
in near-critical polymer solutions.  Similar phenomena are expected in 
a broad range of soft-matter materials as gels, microemulsions, and 
lyotropic liquid crystals, wherever critical fluctuations may couple 
with the mesoscopic structure.