About the "normal growth" approximation in the dynamical theory of phase transitions L. Truskinovsky Nonequilibrium phase transitions can often be modeled by a surface of dis-continuity propagating into a metastable region. The physical hypothesis of "normal growth" presumes a linear relation between the velocity of the phase boundary and the degree of metastability. The phenomenological coeffi...

Dissipation in granular media leads to interesting phenomena such as cluster formation and crystallization in nonequilibrium dynamical states. The freely cooling system is examined concerning the energy decay and the cluster evolution in time, both in two and three dimensions. We also suggest an interpretation of the three-dimensional cluster growth in terms of percolation theory, but this poin...

The growth of a well-formed epithelial structure is governed by mechanical constraints, cellular apico-basal polarity, and spatially controlled cell division. Here we compared the predictions of a mathematical model of epithelial growth with the morphological analysis of 3D epithelial structures. In both in vitro cyst models and in developing epithelial structures in vivo, epithelial growth cou...

Predicting the long-time, nonequilibrium dynamics of receptor-ligand interactions for structured proteins in a host fluid is a formidable task, but of great importance to predicting and analyzing cell-signaling processes and small molecule drug efficacies. Such processes take place on timescales on the order of milliseconds to seconds, so "brute-force" real-time, molecular or atomic simulations...

Second-harmonic radiation is generated at a gold surface by use of a laser pulse that is varied in duration from 14 to 29 fs and in intensity from 10(9) to 10(11)W/cm(2) . At laser intensities below 10(10)W/cm(2) , the second-harmonic signal has the expected quadratic dependence on pump-laser intensity; however, at higher intensities, the dependence is supraquadratic. This difference arises bec...

Chemists have developed mechanistic insight into numerous chemical reactions by thoroughly characterizing nonequilibrium species. Although methods to probe these processes are well established for molecules, analogous techniques for understanding intermediate structures in nanomaterials have been lacking. We monitor the shape evolution of individual anisotropic gold nanostructures as they are o...

In this PhD thesis, we develop models of surfaces of epitaxially grown crystals. In the introductory chapter 1, we introduce the most important physical processes which occur on crystal surfaces in a molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) environment. In the first part of this work (chapters 2–4) we model the (001) surface of the II-VI semiconductors CdTe and ZnSe, our main focus being on CdTe. In the se...

Several interrelated phenomena near the surface ablated into a discharge plasma, such as ablation and ionization in accelerated plasma are studied. Two characteristic ablation modes are identified, namely, ablation mode with a velocity at the Knudsen layer edge smaller than the local sound speed and a velocity at the Knudsen layer edge close to the sound speed. The existence of these two ablati...

We consider magnetic friction between two systems of q-state Potts spins which are moving along their boundaries with a relative constant velocity ν. Due to the interaction between the surface spins there is a permanent energy flow and the system is in a steady state, which is far from equilibrium. The problem is treated analytically in the limit ν=∞ (in one dimension, as well as in two dimensi...