Physical Society Colloquium

Boiling, freezing, and other things we thought we understood...

Daan Frenkel

Department of Chemistry
University of Cambridge

The Second Law of Thermodynamics is often viewed as the scientific expression of our everyday experience that chaos increases spontaneously. However, entropy is more subtle than that - for instance, it can be higher in ordered solids than in disordered liquids. Many of the more unexpected properties of entropy, such as attraction-through-repulsion or boiling below the freezing point can actually be observed in “soft” matter. In my talk I will review how recent experiments and simulations have changed our understanding of the role of entropy in phase transformations.