Irvine : UCI, Swiss Exploring Physics Phenomenon

UC Irvine and Ecole Polytechnique Federale in Lausanne, Switzerland, united by work at both institutions by the same physicist, are jointly exploring a phenomenon called “the transition to chaos.”

The phenomenon is one of the mysteries of modern physics. Transition to chaos refers to the stage when an ordered, predictable system of matter suddenly become disordered, random and unpredictable.

Nathan Rynn, a professor of physics at UCI, has worked both in Irvine and in Switzerland on the mystery of unpredictable behavior of matter. For many years, physicists assumed that the future behavior of any system could be predicted accurately if one knew its initial conditions and the physical laws of motion.

But scientists later discovered that matter sometimes switches from an orderly, predictable flow and direction and becomes erratic and unpredictable. This is the transition to chaos.

In 1959, Rynn invented a device to study plasma--a name for ionized gas. The device, called a “Q machine” can measure velocities of plasma. UCI had the only Q machine in the world until Rynn helped the Swiss school build such a device.