Researcher's Information
Numerical Studies for Understanding Chaotic Motion of Atoms in a Nanoparticle
Every physical system is constantly changing its state both at a microscopic and a macroscopic scale.
In particular, nonlinearity in a dynamical rule often brings a highly complicated behavior to the system. In fact, during the time evolution of the nano-sized system, one can experimentally and numerically find a wide variety of individual and collective motion which seems to be originated from nonlinearity in the evolution rule.
For example, Au nanoparticles are known to change their shape continuously even below melting point. Such an isomerization process is a typical case where the large fluctuation dominated by nonlinearity in dynamics plays a primary role for the transition as a whole.
The main interest of our research group is to understand a complicated motion of the constituent atoms and molecules from the viewpoint of dynamical systems theory with the help of numerical simulation.
One of our goals is to give a firm theoretical basis for the understandings of microscopic mechanisms behind the complicate behaviors which can be experimentally observed in various phenomena.
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A particle simulation of the so-called milk-crown phenomenon (by N. Fukada) : A visualization often gives a physical intuition for the understanding of the complicated behaviors.