Prof. Dr. Harald Garcke
The beauty and variety of snow crystals continues to fascinate laymen and scientists alike. In my talk I will first give a short review of the history of snow crystal research starting with the pioneering work of Johannes Kepler. Then a mathematical model for snow crystal growth, leading to a free boundary problem for a parabolic partial differential equation, is derived. I will briefly discuss how this free boundary problem can be formulated as a gradient flow and how this viewpoint leads to existence of weak solutions. Finally, I will introduce a new numerical method for snow crystal growth which allows it for the first time to compute many snow crystal forms that appear in nature with the help of a model which is based on basic physical laws.
Datum: 07.05.2015, Raum: G03-106, Zeit: 17:00