Events

Event Information:

• Tue

  19

  Oct

  2021

  Colloquium: Graduate Student's Departmental Research

  4:00 pmLewis Hall 101

  Sudeep Adhikari
  Department of Physics and Astronomy
  University of Mississippi

  Universality in Activated Barrier Crossing

  The thermal activation process by which a system passes from one local energy minimum to another by crossing an energy barrier is a recurring motif in physics, chemistry, and biology. For instance, biopolymer chains are typically modeled in terms of energy landscapes, with folded and unfolded configurations represented by two distinct wells separated by a barrier. The rate of transfer from the unfolded to folded state depends most importantly on the height of the barrier with respect to the temperature of the heat bath—but also in seemingly idiosyncratic ways on the details of the shape of the barrier. We consider the case of bias due to an external force, analogous to the pulling force applied in optical tweezer experiments on biopolymers. We identify the universal behavior of the barrier crossing process and demonstrate that data collapse onto a universal curve can be achieved for simulated data over a wide variety of energy landscapes having barriers of different heights and shapes.

   

  John Waite
  Department of Physics and Astronomy
  University of Mississippi

  Flavor SU(3) in Cabibbo-favored D-meson Decays

  Model-independent description of nonleptonic decays of charmed mesons is a challenging task due to the large nonperturbative effects of strong interactions on the transition amplitudes. We discuss the equivalence of two different flavor-SU(3)-based descriptions of Cabibbo-favored non-leptonic decays of charmed mesons to two-pseudoscalars final states including the η and η′ mesons.

   

  Join Zoom Meeting

  https://olemiss.zoom.us/j/91928227187

  Meeting ID: 919 282 27187