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Poster Session

Rare Events in High-Dimensional Systems

February 23 - 27, 2009


Organizing Committee | Scientific Overview | Speaker List

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Organizing Committee

Giovanni Ciccotti (Università di Roma “La Sapienza”)
Kristen Fichthorn (Pennsylvania State University)
Ioannis Kevrekidis (Princeton University)
Christof Schuette (Freie Universität Berlin)
Eric Vanden-Eijnden (New York University)
Arthur Voter (Los Alamos National Laboratory, Theoretical Division)

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Scientific Overview

The dynamics of condensed materials is typically characterized by a wide range of time scales, complicating their study with computer simulations. Of particular difficulty are situations with large time-scale gaps which include, for example, conformation changes of macromolecules, nucleation events during first-order phase transitions, chemical reactions in solution and on surfaces, transport in and on solids, and genetic switches displaying bistable behavior. The occurrence of such disparate time scales is often related to dynamical bottlenecks of energetic and/or entropic origin which partition the configuration space of the system into metastable basins. The system spends most of its time fluctuating within these long-lived metastable states and transitions between them only rarely. These rare events then determine the long-time evolution of the system.

It is a significant theoretical and computational challenge to quantify the rates and mechanisms of rare events, especially in complex systems with high dimensionality. While there is a growing consensus on the open questions in the context of rare events, it is still not clear how well these questions are addressed by current theoretical and computational techniques. The objective of the workshop is to address these issues through discussions and presentations involving perspectives from mathematicians, chemists, physicists, and engineers.

This workshop will include a poster session; a request for posters will be sent to registered participants in advance of the workshop.

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Confirmed Speakers

Gerard Barkema (Utrecht University)
Gerard Ben Arous (New York University)
Peter Bolhuis (Universiteit van Amsterdam)
Sara Bonella (Università di Roma “La Sapienza”)
Giovanni Bussi (Università di Modena)
David Chandler (University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley))
John Chodera (University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley))
Giovanni Ciccotti (Università di Roma “La Sapienza”)
Cecilia Clementi (Rice University)
Ron Elber (University of Texas at Austin)
Kristen Fichthorn (Pennsylvania State University)
Graeme Henkelman (University of Texas at Austin)
Ioannis Kevrekidis (Princeton University)
Jorge Kurchan (École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles de la Ville de Paris (ESPCI))
Thomas Miller (California Institute of Technology)
Normand Mousseau (University of Montreal)
Frank Noe (Freie Universität Berlin)
Vijay Pande (Stanford University)
Baron Peters (University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara))
Weiqing Ren (New York University)
Benoit Roux (University of Chicago)
Christof Schuette (Freie Universität Berlin)
Bernhardt Trout (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Mark Tuckerman (New York University)
Eric Vanden-Eijnden (New York University)
Maddalena Venturoli (New York University)
Arthur Voter (Los Alamos National Laboratory)

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Contact Us:

Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM)
Attn: RE2009
460 Portola Plaza
Los Angeles CA 90095-7121
Phone: 310 825-4755
Fax: 310 825-4756
Email:
Website: http://www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/re2009/

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