GALCIT Colloquium

A sole source of inspiration for the work to be presented is the celebrated photograph of milk drop coronet by Harold Edgerton. In an effort to dissect the physics underlying the coronet formation, the author and his students went on a journey of studying various, seemingly disparate, phenomena both experimentally and theoretically. Among the problems to be discussed are instability of accelerated curved interfaces, disintegration of a retracting soap film, water hammering, impulse-driven drop on a membrane, acoustic reflection and refraction at fluid interfaces, and Faraday waves on time-varying spatial domains. Via establishing a relation of these studies to the coronet problem, the rich multiple scale physics of the latter will be highlighted and, in particular, compressibility, viscosity, surface tension, and dynamical systems effects elucidated.