Condensed Matter & Thermal Physics Group, MPA-10

Nonlinear Dynamics

Michael K. Rivera - team leader

Jun Chen
Philippe Odier
Mahesh Bandi

Team description:

From the swirling arms of galaxies to the mixing of cream in your coffee, the universe evolves through non-linear interactions. In our laboratory we study a wide range of these phenomenon, including mixing in turbulent fluids and flows in granular media. Our studies in fluid mixing occur in both two and three dimensional fluids and probe fundamental questions about turbulent phenomenon as well as questions more specifically targeted to geophysical flows, such as mixing in oceanic overflows. These turbulent mixing studies are a supporting interest to a large number of LANL's grand challenges, including stockpile stewardship and global climate modeling. In the area of granular media we study avalanches, granular flow instabilities and the transition of granular media from a freely flowing state to a jammed state. Granular flow studies are important for both industrial interests where significant amounts of energy are utilized in moving granular materials around, as well as geophysical phenomenon like the jammed/unjammed state (i.e. earthquakes) around a fault line.

Fluid mixing from the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability in the geophysical overflow experiment.

MPA-10 TEAMS

Thermal Physics

• Thermoacoustics
• Nonlinear Dynamics
• Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative R&D

Correlated Electrons

• Materials Synthesis and Characterization
• Transport and Thermodynamics
• Novel Materials at Extreme Conditions
• Very Low Temperature Physics

Actinide Chemistry

• Heavy-Element Chemistry

Low Energy Spectroscopy

• Condensed Matter NMR
• Photoelectron Spectroscopy
• Magnetic Resonance Force Microscopy
• Mossbauer Spectroscopy
• Neutron Scattering