Assistant Professor Shuwang Li Featured on Cover of Physical Review Letters

Assistant Professor Shuwang Li's article, "Control of Viscous Fingering Patterns in a Radial Hele-Shaw Cell," is featured on the cover of the May 1st, 2009 issue of Physical Review Letters.

Concerned with the pattern selection mechanism of systems driven out of equilibrium, the paper describes research in controlling shape instabilities during evolution. The theory developed by Prof. Li and his coworkers have involved analyses of the continuum governing partial differential equations and the development and application of highly accurate and efficient numerical methods to simulate the nonlinear systems. The experiments, performed with physicists at the Liquid Crystal Institute at Kent State University in Ohio, confirm the feasibility of the theory.

Physical Review Letters is an international letters journal covering topics of all fields of general physics, and is considered to be a prestigious publication specializing in fundamental research. This is Li's first publication as a member of the Applied Mathematics faculty at IIT.

"It's not common for mathematicians to publish in this journal, but as applied mathematicians we can reach out and work with experimentalists in these fields," Li said.