Lectures > Lecture 10

Lecture 10 by Henning Loewe, Snow Physics Group, WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF, Davos Dorf, Switzerland.

Title: Ephemeral snow crystals on the ground -- Can we infer local non-equilibrium thermodynamics at growing crystal surfaces from 4D X-ray tomography data?

The lecture considers the evolution of snow crystals as a particular example for the physics of moving interfaces. The lecture will briefly introduce the thermodynamic basis to grasp common pore-scale modelling strategies for predicting crystal growth. Models comprise coupled heat and mass diffusion in the presence of complex, sharp interfaces or their equivalent phase field formulations. An overview of the current state of research will be given by summarizing advances and pitfalls when validating local model ingredients from 4D image data acquired in time-lapse tomography experiments.

Biography: Henning Löwe received a PhD degree in Theoretical Physics from the University of Göttingen in 2004. Since 2012 he has been a lecturer in the Department of Earth Sciences at ETH, Zurich, and since 2018 he has been the head of the research group Snow Physics at SLF in Davos. His work is dedicated to microstructure controls on mechanical, thermal, electromagnetic, and crystal growth processes in snow.