Lunch Pitch with Merve Yesilbas and Signe Lundqvist: Mars and Motion

March 1, 2022 @ 12:00 - 13:00

Lunch Pitches with Merve Yesilbas and Signe Lundqvist

To encourage cross pollination of ideas between researchers from different disciplines, IceLab hosts interdisciplinary research lunches with the vision of allowing ideas to meet and mate. During the Lunch Pitch Season, the creative lunches take place at KBC, usually every other Tuesday.
Time: Tuesday 1 March at 12:00.
 
 

 

Pitch 1: Merve Yesilbas: Following the Water on Mars: Is it just a cold desert or habitable environment?

Assistant Professor at the Department of Chemistry and Group Leader of Yeşilbaş Lab. ‘Planetary Geochemistry and Spectroscopy’.

Abstract: 

Mars seems like an inhabitable frozen desert today, and extreme conditions allow no stable water on the surface. Still, the near surface of Mars could stabilize liquid water with the help of hydrated minerals and salts. Recognizing the water retention capability of martian soils could pave a new pathway for astrobiology studies to search for life, understand the aqueous geochemical history, and even potential water resources on Mars.

My research focuses on the extreme dry and cold environments on Earth as analogues to Mars. I chiefly use vibrational spectroscopy to understand the geochemical changes on the planet Mars. In this talk, I will show how salty martian soils transform from permafrost to slush and then to dry soils during diurnal cycles. I will discuss how we can search for water and life to support the ongoing and upcoming Mars missions of National Aeronautics Space Administration (NASA) and European Space Agency (ESA).

 

Pitch 2: Signe Lundqvist: Can we use combinatorics to predict motions of molecules?

PhD student at the Department of Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics at Umeå University, working with Klara Stokes and Lars-Daniel Öhman.

Abstract: 

Can we use combinatorics to predict motions of molecules? Molecules can be modeled by combinatorial graphs: sets of vertices representing atoms and edges representing their bonds. The aim of combinatorial rigidity theory is to develop simple tools to determine when structures, for example models of molecules, can move. Rigidity theory has a wide variety of applications, for example in network localization, computer graphics and mechanism theory.

Our recent research has focused on rigidity of structures consisting of rigid rods connected by joints, so called rod configurations. We developed a way of determining when a rod configuration is rigid. This is related to the molecular conjecture, which is named as such because of its applications to rigidity of molecules. Specifically, a consequence of the molecular conjecture is that an existing algorithm used to determine the rigidity of structures consisting of rigid bodies and hinges can correctly predict the rigidity of molecules. We are now interested in applying our more general result to similar problems.

 

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