Graduate Student: Marat Kulakhmetov
Collaborators: Drs. Michael Gallis, Dan Rader (Sandia)
At the most fundamental level, interaction between gas molecules could be described by the Schrodinger wave equation. However, this equation cannot be solved for complex aerodynamic flows. Instead, by applying a few approximations it is possible to solve the electronic part of the Schrodinger equation for fixed atomic coordinates to produce a potential energy surface. This surface could then be used to study millions of binary collisions and improve our understanding of fundamental gas interactions. Two collisions, between an O2 molecule an an O atom are shown below. In the first movie, the molecule was initially in the zeroth vibrational level while in the second movie it was in the 15th vibrational level. The initial vibrational level results in dramatically different collision dynamics.