UC Berkeley chemists detail secrets of ionization, reasons behind water's central role in chemist...( t the surface looks like and you can s...)

Chandler is confident his calculations represent reality. Nevertheless, they predict strong, though transient, electric fields in the liquid that should be measurable.

The technique should be applicable to many processes now impossible to measure experimentally because they are rare and, until now too, difficult to calculate. Co-author Christoph Dellago, now at the University of Rochester, N.Y., and Peter Bolhuis, another former post-doc now a faculty member at the University of Amsterdam, are trying to understand how glass reorganizes on a timescale of decades. And Chandler hopes to discover how substances nucleate, such as the sudden freezing of a supercooled liquid.

"Defining a pathway between one state and another is a very famous optimization problem, and our technique is part of the solution to that general class of problems," Chandler said. "This is a big generalization of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics."

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Contact: Robert Sanders
rls@pa.urel.berkeley.edu
510-643-6998
University of California - Berkeley
18-Mar-2001