The Department of Mathematical Sciences will continue its free Math Seminar Series on Friday, February 1, at 11:20 a.m. in the Business and Science Building, Room 334. Dr. Aaron Smith from the University of Ottawa, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, will present, “Mixing and the Glass Transition.” 

The abstract of Dr. Smith’s talk is as follows:

Supercooled liquid forms when a liquid is cooled below its usual freezing temperature without entering a crystalline solid phase. As supercooled liquids continue to get colder, they exhibit something called the glass transition: they remain disordered, but start to otherwise behave much like solids. This glass transition is important for many materials, including rubbers and colloids, but is not theoretically well-understood. In this talk I will introduce a simple model for the glass transition that is easy to understand but difficult to study. I will then introduce two related families of models, introduced by physicists, that seem to give similar “glassy” behavior. Finally, I will present some heuristics and recent results on the relaxation and mixing behavior of these two models. My results in this talk are from joint and ongoing work with Paul Chleboun, Alessandra Faggionato, Fabio Martinelli, Natesh Pillai and Cristina Toninelli.