Abstract: There is currently much interest in glassy cooperative dynamics in systems without imposed quenched disorder in their controlling Hamiltonians (as opposed to spin glasses which have quenched Hamiltonian disorder). Most such studies are based on systems with interacting many-body Hamiltonians and several novel and characteristic features have been demonstrated. In this talk I shall introduce and discuss a sequence of simple models without any Hamiltonian interaction but with constrained dynamics suggested by idealizations of foams and covalent glasses and demonstrate that they have some cooperative features reminiscent of glasses, such as fast temperature- independent and and slow temperature- and/or waiting-time- dependent decays. The behaviour can be understood in terms of (several) diffusion-annihilation processes and related to the predictions of asymptotic non-equilibrium dynamical field theory.
The initial studies are simulational but I shall close with a fully soluble model.
This work has been done in collaboration with T. Aste, A. Buhot, L. Davison, and J.P. Garrahan.
Sébastien BALIBAR and Tomohiro UENO, MIT-Harvard
"Anomalous Wetting and the Critical Casimir Effect"
Abstract:
When a phase separated liquid mixture is in contact with a wall, and
when its critical point is approached, one of the critical phases
usually wets completely the wall. This is a very general phenomenon
called "critical point wetting". We have found a first exception to
it by measuring the contact angle of a 3He-4He interface against a
sapphire window. We propose that the absence of "critical point
wetting" is a consequence of the "critical Casimir effect", i.e. a
long range force due to the confinement of the fluctuations of
superfludity in thin films.
Grayson Barber is a First Amendment litigator and privacy advocate with a solo practice in Princeton, New Jersey. She sits on the boards of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey (ACLU-NJ) and the National ACLU board, as well as chairing the ACLU-NJ's privacy committee. She also chairs the Individual Rights Section of the New Jersey State Bar Association. Her recent First Amendment cases include challenges to government censorship in public forums, and an early challenge to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Felten v. Recording Industry Association of America. She advises the Intellectual Freedom subcommittee of the New Jersey Library Association and has recently been appointed to the New Jersey Privacy Study Commission. Ms. Barber is a graduate of Rutgers Law School in Newark, and clerked for the Honorable Robert E. Cowen, United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.