4:00 pm, Thursday, March 30, 2023
Science Building, room 106

DR-EAM: Polarizable Potential for Metals, Dr. Hemanta Bhattarai, Science Speakers

Time change: This lecture will start at 4:15

What happens when Earth's most common liquid--water-- comes into contact with a metal surface? Dr. Bhattarai has studied this fundamental system using molecular dynamics to simulate the interactions between metals and water molecules near the interface.

The embedded atom method, EAM, has been widely used. But it models the valence charge density of atoms as static, whereas metal atoms are easily polarized in a modest electric field.

Dr. Bhattarai has modified the EAM approach to allow the charge densities of the metal atoms to readjust themselves in response to the highly polar water molecules nearby.

Using this revised "density readjusting EAM" (DR-EAM), he has studied the ordering of the water molecules, and thermal conductance near a gold (111) -water interface, and will share his findings.

Dr. Hemanta Bhattarai is a condensed matter physicist with a research appointment at the Pennsylvania State University. He did his doctoral research at the University of Notre Dame.

Figure from doi:10.1021/acs.chemrev.1c00679

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Contact: Paul Meyer Reimer, phone 7318, email paulmr@goshen.edu

See also: Goshen College Physics Department