Faculty Sponsor: Brian Stewart
Mathis Blanc
Mathis is a rising Sophomore from Los Altos, California. He graduated from Los Altos High School in 2022. He is majoring in Physics and Mathematics and pursuing physics past graduation. Outside of academics, Mathis is a goalkeeper on the Wesleyan men’s Soccer team.
Abstract: Although atom-diatom collisions are an intrinsically quantum mechanical problem, we can learn a lot about the system’s dynamics by modeling it as a classical three-body problem with constraints. To better understand the atom-diatom collisions and their trajectories, the interactions between three bodies under their molecular potentials have to be understood. We can move from the case of the stellar dynamics where the three-body problem is governed by the gravitational potential to the molecular dynamics case by adding a repulsive term and gradually changing the power of the attractive term to better match the forces. To draw physically significant conclusions, we compare many exit properties of the system, notably the identity of the exiting body, vibrational action, and the scattering angle of the exit escaping body. By varying initial conditions, we can use the Bulirsch-Stoer numerical integration method and Levi Civita regularization to run trajectories for different initial conditions and draw physical understanding of the nuanced system.
FinalPoster_2023