Please join us on Saturday, October 16, 2004 at Brandeis University to meet and listen to your colleagues in the New England area working in statistical mechanics. The main goal of these meetings is to offer an informal, friendly, and supportive environment where people from a variety of departments and institutions can meet and exchange ideas and where old and new friends can meet.

There will be coffee and bagels from 9:00 am to 9:30 am and four sessions beginning at 9:30 am. Each session features a 25 minute invited talk, and the first three sessions also include a total of 27 three minute contributed talks. Viewgraphs can be used to show graphs and other visualizations of results, but the use of viewgraphs to present equations is discouraged. Laptops cannot be used for contributed talks. Contributors are encouraged to post their viewgraphs during the coffee breaks to facilitate discussions. Lunch will last for 90 minutes to give attendees a chance to mingle. Coffee will be available at all times. The meeting will conclude at approximately 3:30 pm.

All talks will be in Abelson, Room 131, in the Department of Physics. Signs will be posted.

1. Anette (Peko) Hosoi, MIT, "Two-dimensional Nanoscale Patterns in Diblock Copolymers: Experiment and Theory."
2. Sean Ling, Brown University, "Abrikosov Bragg Glass Melting: Origin of the Peak Effect."
3. Dan Rothman, MIT, "Long-time Dynamics in a Wet Sandbox: From Avalanches to PDE's."
4. Anders Sandvik, Boston University, "Phase Transitions in Diluted 2D Quantum Antiferromagnets."

1. Udayan Mohanty, Boston College, "Conformation Change and Ion Atmosphere: Branched RNA Structures."
2. Allison Ferguson, Brandeis University, "Stress and Large-Scale Dynamical Structures in Granular Flow."
3. Royce Zia, Virginia Tech, "Steady states in mass transport models: Condition for factorizability and construction of all exact solutions."
4. Beate Schmittmann, Virginia Tech, "Will jams get worse when slow cars move over?"
5. James Landry, Alphatech Inc., "Forces and Impulses in Granular Hopper Flow."
6. Shan-Wen Tsai, Boston University, "Renormalization-group approach to interacting electrons coupled with phonons."
7. Ashok Prasad, Brandeis University, "Stretching DNA in Flatland."
8. Peter Weichman, Alphatech, Inc., "Statistical mechanics of submarine detection in a cluttered environment."
9. Natali Gulbahce, Clark University and LANL, "Quench depth and range of interaction effects in homogeneous and heterogeneous nucleation."
10. Joshua Martin, Brandeis University, "Dynamics of Confined DNA."
11. Nikolay Prokofiev, UMass, Amherst, "Weak first-order superfluid-solid quantum phase transitions."
12. Abdellah Dakhama, Northeastern, "On the existence of two compensation temperatures in a ferrimagnet."
13. Shubha Tewari, Mount Holyoke College, "Spatial Correlations in Dense Granular Flow."
14. Boris Svistunov, UMass, Amherst, "On the Supersolid State of Matter."
15. Courtney Lannert, Wellesley College, "Interesting spatially-inhomogeneous phases of bosonic atoms in optical lattices."
16. Rich Oberdorf, Brandeis University, "Compact Polymer Melting and Phase Transition."
17. Rafael Garcia, WPI, "Wetting Transitions and Fluctuation Induced Forces in Films."
18. Claudio Chamon, Boston University, "Breakdown of one-parameter scaling in quantum critical scenarios for the high-temperature copper oxide superconductors."
19. Oleg Shpyrko, Harvard University, "Surface Freezing and Surface Segregation in Binary Liquids."
20. Rama Bansil, Boston University, "Kinetics of Ordering Transitions in Block Copolymers."
21. Junchao Xia, Clark University, "Effects of long range interactions in the Burridge-Knopoff earthquake model."
22. Lorin Gutman, MIT, "Chemical reaction and conformational relaxation modulated collapse kinetics of a single macromolecule."
23. Jan Fiala, University of Maine, Orono, "Comments on the correlation length of the Farey fraction spin chain."
24. Hasan Guclu, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, "Slow convergence to the asymptotic steady-state width distribution in a 2D Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) surface."
25. Gyorgy Korniss, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, "Global time scales in ecological invasions."
26. Giulio Biroli, Service de Physique Theorique, CEA Saclay, "Dynamical heterogeneity and diverging length scale in the mode-coupling theory of the glass transition."
27. Zoltan Toroczkai, CNLS, Los Alamos National Laboratory, "Gradient Networks."
28. Rajesh Ravindran, Brandeis University, "Constant flux relation in driven dissipative systems."
29. Yuko Hori, Brandeis University, "DNA Stretching by Electric Fields."
30. Balazs Kozma, RPI, "Processes on small-world networks with distance-dependent random links."
31. Tibor Antal, Boston University, "Minimal model of growing weighted networks."

Gyorgy Korniss, Courtney Lannert, Jon Machta, and Shubha Tewari have agreed to chair the sessions.

The cost of the meeting is being subsidized by the New England Section of the American Physical Society, and hence there is no registration fee if you register by the deadline. However, it is necessary to register in advance so that sufficient food and refreshments will be available. The deadline for registration is Tuesday, October 12. If you miss the deadline, you are still welcome to attend the meeting, but the cost will be $10, and we cannot guarantee that food will be available. Information about joining the New England Section if you are not already a member will be available at the meeting.

Directions to Brandeis. After you enter the campus, you will need to take an alternate route due to construction. As you enter Brandeis through the main entrance on South Street, drive toward the police booth and then take the right fork. Go up the hill and then make the first left. Drive further up the hill and around the biology building until you reach the end of the road. You will now be at the K parking lot adjacent to the Physics building. You can park there or in any free spot along the way. The Physics building is on your left as you enter the parking lot. The building has an observatory on the rooftop and can be seen from reasonably far away. No parking permits are needed.

The Brandeis/Roberts commuter rail stop is very convenient. Trains depart to North Station at 3:44 pm, 6:11 pm, 6:34 pm, and 10:14 pm. Buses are also available.

Previous meetings:

1. The first meeting took place on Saturday, October 16, 1999 at Brandeis. We also honored the memory and work of Eugene Gross, a founding member of the physics faculty at Brandeis University and researcher in statistical mechanics.
2. Saturday, October 14, 2000.
3. Saturday, October 20, 2001.
4. Saturday, October 19, 2002.
5. Saturday, October 18, 2003.

Announcements

• The fall 2004 meeting of the New England Section of the APS/AAPT, will be at Pratt and Whitney, East Hartford, October 22-23. The theme of the meeting is Climate and FlightThe Spring 2005 meeting will be at MIT on April 8 and 9, 2005. The theme of the meeting will be on Einstein.
• 92th Statistical Mechanics Conference, Rutgers University, December 19-21, 2004.
• Slow Dynamics Tutorial, Brandeis University, Saturday, October 23, 2004. 9:30 am - 4 pm. Register. Deadline: October 20. This tutorial is the first in a series of mini courses that will focus on the theoretical and experimental issues associated with the slow dynamics arising from constraints. The mini courses are primarily intended to be a resource for graduate students and postdocs interested in the interdisciplinary aspects of slow dynamics. In addition to these tutorials.
• A postdoctoral position is available in the Chemistry Department at Clark University with Sharon (Shuanghong) Huo to study protein-protein and protein-small molecule interactions.
• Joel Lebowitz's human rights petition.

Organizing committee

• Bulbul Chakraborty, Brandeis University, bulbul@brandeis.edu
• Claudio Chamon, Boston University, chamon@buphy.bu.edu
• Harvey Gould, Clark University, hgould@clarku.edu
• Bill Klein, Boston University, klein@buphy.bu.edu

Advisory committee

• Greg Huber, Jon Machta, Susan McKay, Irwin Oppenheim, Sid Redner, David Weitz, Po-zen Wong

Please send questions, comments, and corrections to Harvey Gould, hgould@clarku.edu.