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abstractthe speaker

Seminar On
First Passage Statistics on Irregular Surface
by
Kiran Kolwankar
R. J. College, Mumbai

Tuesday, 16 October 2007, 2:00–3:00 PM
Seminar Hall, Department of Physics

Abstract The diffusive motion of Brownian particles near irregular interfaces plays a crucial role in various transport phenomena in nature and industry. Most diffusion-reaction processes in confining interfacial systems involve a sequence of Brownian flights in the bulk, connecting successive hits with the interface (Brownian bridges). The statistics of times and displacements separating two interface encounters are then determinant in the overall transport. We present a theoretical and numerical analysis of this complex first-passage problem. We show that the bridge statistics is directly related to the Minkowski content of the surface within the usual diffusion length. In the case of self-similar or self-affine interfaces, we show and check numerically that the bridge statistics follows power laws with exponents depending directly on the surface fractal dimension.

The Speaker Dr. Kiran Kolwankar (Ph.D. Physics: Mathematical and statistical physics; 1998, Savitribai Phule Pune University) is currently a faculty at the R. J. College, Mumbai. His research areas include mathematical physics, statistical physics and nonlinear dynamics. His Ph.D. thesis was awarded the Best Thesis Award in the 2000 DAE symposium. After his Ph.D., he worked as a visiting scientist/post doctoral fellow at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and in several reputed institutes in France. He was then awarded the prestigeous Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship to work at the Max Plank Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, Leipzig, Germany. He has 16 publications to his credit, with a collective citation count of more than 100. He is a regular reviewer for several journals such as Journal of Fractional Calculus and Applied Analysis, Computer Aided Geometric Design, and Journal of Statistical Physics.

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