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Thursday, June 26, 2008
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
CNLS Conference Room (TA-3, Bldg 1690)

Seminar

Ground state configurations on surfaces: hexagons and minimal zeta functions

Prof. Doug Hardin
Vanderbilt University, Mathematics Department

We consider asymptotic properties of ground state configurations of point charges restricted to a conducting surface and interacting through an inverse power law potential as the number of points goes to infinity. Experimentally, it appears that the local structure of such configurations is almost everywhere hexagonal. We relate this to a conjecture that a certain constant appearing in the asymptotic expansion of the total energy is given by the Epstein zeta function on a hexagonal lattice.

Host: Razvan Teodorescu, T-CNLS and T-13