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Goong Chen

2007-08-10
15:00:00 - 16:00:00

308 , Mathematics Research Center Building (ori. New Math. Bldg.)

After the Reports of IPCC (The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) of the United Nations earlier this year, it has been widely agreed that greenhouse gases are the likely main culprit for climate change now taking place. Nevertheless, controversies persist as how to estimate the temperature increase more accurately, and whether there are other causes more serious than greenhouse gases. In this series of two talks, the speaker will present the heuristic modeling approach used by physicists, chemists and climatologists and how they identify the heat absorption effects of gases. The study is mainly based on IR (infrared) spectroscopic properties of the primary greenhouse gases: water Vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone. We\'ll discuss how these gases absorb and emit the IF spectra. The speaker will then illustrate how to compute the IR spectra using the Gaussian software in computational chemistry and the molecular motions based on the multi-particle Schrodinger with a Coulomb potential. He then interprets the molecular IR spectra from group representations and symmetries as the mathematical connection to the study of greenhouse gases.