Scraping Energy Landscapes

Wed
03/30/2011
1:00pm
RLM 11.204
Dhruv Bansal
Scraping Energy Landscapes
 
Statistical mechanical systems can be described by very
high-dimensional energy landscapes.  These landscapes are in turn
described by their stationary points (minima, saddles, & maxima).
Many thermodynamic properties of the original system can be recovered
from a catalogue of these stationary points.  In this talk I will give
some background on the energy landscape perspective of statistical
systems, describe some existing theoretical work that links stationary
points to thermodynamics, and tell about an energy landscape explorer
I am building that numerically explores a given landscape, searching
for all its stationary points.