Royce Zia Professor of Physics Condensed Matter Theory A.B. Princeton, 1964. Ph.D. MIT, 1968. Short Bio 540-231-5767  115 Robeson Hall (fax: 540-231-7511) VT Physics Home rkpzia "at" vt.edu

Educational Activities Current teaching: "Thermal Physics" 3704 Recent papers published in the American Journal of Physics: Making Sense of the Legendre Transform Getting more from pushing less: Negative specific heat and conductivity in nonequilibrium steady states Watching a drunkard for 10 nights: A study of distributions of variances "Weather" records: Musings on cold days after a long hot Indian summer Research Interests Non-equilibrium statistical mechanics  Phase transitions and critical phenomena  Driven diffusive systems  Interfaces and surfaces  Renormalization group analysis  Monte Carlo simulation techniques  Stochastic differential equations and field theory  "Nuggets" for the NSF:   2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 Recent Activities Publications: Journal articles, Reviews and school/workshop proceedings, Preprints and postings Conferences and Workshops:   93rd Statistical Mechanics Conference (May 2005) ASC Workshop on Brownian Motion (September 2005) Principles of the Dynamics of Non-Equilibrium Systems (May 2006) Spontaneous symmetry breaking in particle systems far from equilibrium (September 2006) Lattices and Trajectories: A Symposium of Mathematical Chemistry (June 2007) Statistical Physics Out of Equilibrium (November 2007) The Physics of Fluctuations (Max-Planck Institute for Metallforschung, July 2008) 100th Statistical Mechanics Conference (December 2008) Many-body systems far from equilibrium (February 2009) 34th Conference of the Middle European Cooperation in Statistical Physics (March 2009) Steady-states, fluctuations and dynamics of non equilibrium systems (June 2009) Nonequilibrium Statistical Mechanics: Fundamental Problems and Applications (July 2009) 4th KIAS Conference on Statistical Physics (July 2010)