Tomorrow's lecture looks at an amazing experiment on the space shuttle that was used to determine one of the critical exponents for the superfluid transition to 6 significant figures. I then introduce the idea of an order parameter and broken symmetry. A nice simple illustration of the latter is the problem of optimising the total lengths of the roads joining four cities at the corner of a square. The solution can be seen in the shape of soap films and in the honeycomb structure found in bee hives.
Monday, May 18, 2009
Towards broken symmetry
Tomorrow's lecture looks at an amazing experiment on the space shuttle that was used to determine one of the critical exponents for the superfluid transition to 6 significant figures. I then introduce the idea of an order parameter and broken symmetry. A nice simple illustration of the latter is the problem of optimising the total lengths of the roads joining four cities at the corner of a square. The solution can be seen in the shape of soap films and in the honeycomb structure found in bee hives.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Elastic frustration in molecular crystals
Crystals of large molecules exhibit diverse structures. In other words, the geometric arrangements of the molecules relative to one another ...
-
Is it something to do with breakdown of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation? In molecular spectroscopy you occasionally hear this term thro... -
Nitrogen fluoride (NF) seems like a very simple molecule and you would think it would very well understood, particularly as it is small enou... -
Attempts to develop a quantum theory of gravity continue to falter and stagnate. Given this, it is worth considering approaches that start w...
No comments:
Post a Comment