Many large scale physical properties such as the "roughness" of a piece of sandpaper or the resilience of a sheet of metal depend upon the small scale properties of the medium e.g. atomic arrangement or the presence of defects in the medium. Intuitively, a piece of sandpaper feels "rough" and presents frictional resistance when an object moves across it because it has an uneven ("wiggly") surface.

The exact way in which microstructure determines macroscopic observables (e.g. friction coefficients) is not fully or rigorously understood. Be part of the magic as Tim Sullivan takes us on a whistlestop tour of this highly relevant and unusual problem area, touching on his own research to give a concise survey of the main results, focussing on the analytical aspects, not the materials science.

MS03 thursday 7:30-9:00. Then off to the pub.