Description:

Title: Anatomy of an explosion: how to decode the chemical rules

Speaker: Jason R. Green, University of Massachusetts Boston

Abstract: Gaseous mixtures of hydrogen and oxygen can explode, creating harsh and dynamic conditions where molecules transform into a variety of ephemeral species en route to the product, water. These transformations are subject to basic rules, the “chemical mechanism”, which are encoded in the patterns and statistical structure of the chemical species evolved. The need to learn these mechanisms from the experimental data available raises theoretical questions about the application of information theory and nonequilibrium statistical mechanics. I will discuss our recent work in this direction and show how reformulating these mathematical tools gives a new perspective on the ability to learn the chemistry behind explosions.

Host: Adilson Motter

Keywords: Physics, Astronomy, Complex Systems