American physical chemist. He finished
his Ph.D. work at Cornell University in
1952 (his degree was awarded in 1953),
and then went to Chapel Hill, North
Carolina to work as a postdoc with
Oscar K. Rice, where he studied phase
transitions theory based on
thermodynamic
approaches. Widom returned to Cornell
to join the chemistry faculty in 1954.
He worked mainly on the properties of
"lattice" liquid
mixtures. He analyzed the free energy
per unit volume near the critical point
which he transcribed to the Ising model
of a
ferromagnet. He found that the
experimental data on the phase
transition from liquid to gas indicates
that the singular part of the free
energy per particle has a certain
homogeneity property. The
phenomenological property, now called
"scaling," constrained the dependence
of
the free energy on the variables of the
system near the critical point. Widom
realized that the homogeneity property
brought together the various
thermodynamic aspects of
critical phenomena. He found the
functional form of the singular part of
the free energy per spin. His work
stimulated other physicists to seek an
explanation of the homogeneity of the
function. He devised non-classical
equations of state, incorporating
critical point exponents.
Ben Widom is
the Goldwin Smith Professor in the
Department of Chemistry and Chemical
Biology of Cornell University.
Click here to view the INTERVIEW.
|