Summer Undergraduate Research Funding (SURF) Recipient Published

By | October 12, 2020
Photo of Pearce Hamilton
Congrats to Pearce Hamilton and Dr. Mike Larsen of CofC’s Physics department on their recent publication in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters. Their work was funded through a 2020 summer SURF award.

 

Hamilton and Larsen spent the summer researching the Uncertainty of Heterogeneous Freezing Rate of Water on Muscovite Mica. To simply explain their research and its importance, the pair said this: “The freezing of water on microscopic surfaces is a crucial process in cloud physics. It has been shown that surface chemistry may affect the temperature at which water will freeze. We will explore this relationship between surface chemistry and freezing water by treating samples with salt solutions to create surfaces with altered chemical properties. To see if the treatment duration or the concentration of the solution influences our results, the treatment time and salt concentration in the solutions will be systematically varied. Water droplets will then be frozen on the treated surfaces to see if the temperature at which water freezes depends on these variables. We hope to use our results to better understand the underlying mechanism driving the freezing process.”

Watch a presentation of their research below or at https://youtu.be/J0WvwDQBcNE