Spontaneous Energy Focusing Phenomena and Multiscale Physics

Jointly organized by the Julian Schwinger Foundation (JSF) and the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) at the Nanyang Technological University, this workshop aims at gathering renowned experts who would report on their research on phenomena that spontaneously concentrate energy and the physics of phenomena that span different regimes of theoretical description. Future directions will be explored.

The dynamical motion of continuous media which are driven far from equilibrium is dominated by nonlinear processes and not entropy producing transport processes. A time honored example is the turbulence in fluids which still constitutes an unsolved issue. In some cases, nonlinear effects lead to a spontaneous concentration of the energy density so that motion that starts out as well described by a given level of description ends up in a new physical regime. A paradigm of such effects is sonoluminescence, where the passage of a long wavelength sound wave through a fluid results in the expansion and collapse of bubbles which concentrate the energy density by 12 orders of magnitude to generate picosecond flashes of ultraviolet light from a dense highly ionized plasma. Contact electrification is another example of an energy focusing process, and it has found widespread industrial applications. Other examples include: quantum and magnetic flux reconnection, ball lightning, fatigue and failure of materials, force chains in granular media, and solitary waves. The limits to which nonlinear processes focus energy is not known and such predictions are far outside the realm of current theory. Are there new paradigms in the theory of continuous media that can grow out of our examination of the wide range of energy focusing effects that exist in natural physical phenomena?