International Research Fellowship Program: Thermodynamics and Kinetics of Isolated, Molecular Systems

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0700911GreenThe International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct nine to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad.This award will support a twenty-four-month research fellowship by Dr. Jason R. Green to work with Dr. David J. Wales at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, and with Dr. R. Stephen Berry at the University of Chicago in the US.This project combines analytic theory and computation with the goal of elucidating connections between the statistical properties and processes of isolated, molecular systems and nonextensive statistical mechanics. Isolated molecules are routinely studied across the fields of chemistry, biology, and physics. The attention given to these systems makes them an information-rich source for the cultivation of new theory. Statistical mechanical, thermodynamic and traditional statistical kinetic treatments have been successfully applied to the investigation of isolated systems. Molecular systems can, however, deviate from traditional behavior, sometimes extremely. Deviations from theoretical prediction can manifest themselves as differences in the probability and state densities of single-particle vibrational statistics and in the kinetics and dynamics on the potential energy landscape. These deviations point to a need for more general theories describing molecular systems. Our efforts to develop such theories involve the calculation of probability and state densities for model molecular systems. Densities can be used to determine extensive and nonextensive statistical thermodynamic quantities and to model kinetics and dynamics. By comparing these properties and processes of molecules that deviate from traditional theories to those that do not, insight is gained into more general descriptions of the behavior of isolated molecules.