Dr. George Daquila (Ph.D., 2011) and Prof. Uwe Täuber publish paper in Physical Review Letters

Graduate student George Daquila (Ph.D. August 2011) and Prof. Uwe C. Täuber recently published a paper titled Nonequilibrium Relaxation and Critical Aging for Driven Ising Lattice Gases in Phys. Rev. Lett. 108, 110602 (2012).

Dr. Daquila, in collaboration with his adviser Prof. Täuber, used large-scale Monte Carlo computer simulations to investigate the relaxation properties of an interacting lattice gas model. These type of simplified model systems are viewed as prototypical for complex many-particle systems that are driven away from thermal equilibrium. Specifically, George carefully investigated dynamical properties near a critical point in the system that separates a disordered from a striped ordered phase. His careful simulations and data analysis involving scaling theory unambiguously settled a long-standing debate in the literature about the values of critical exponents that quantitatively characterize physical quantities near the phase transition. The data support a 1986 theoretical treatment coauthored by former department chair Beate Schmittmann.