Basic Principles, Complex Consequences

Although liquids are ubiquitous in our lives and technologies, they serve as some of the most complex environments for chemistry and physics. Structured yet disordered, these systems demand a statistical view, posing profound challenges for measurements and modeling alike. Decades of active research have provided fundamental concepts and tools for exploring emergent structure and dynamics in liquids, and the Gordon Conference on the Chemistry and Physics of Liquids has consistently served as the premier venue for their discussion and development. Despite these advances, many important and intriguing mysteries remain, particularly in the realms of energy, biophysics, and materials. Moreover, the physical perspectives that result from research in this classic field find application in diverse interdisciplinary areas. By requiring basic understanding to be considered in new contexts, such applications often shed revealing light back on the liquid state in general.

The 2015 conference will reflect the modern breadth of this subject, featuring sessions that emphasize topics of self-organization, interfacial structure and dynamics, cutting-edge spectroscopy, nucleation and growth of phases structured in space and in time, and diverse solvation phenomena, all in contexts ranging from simple liquids to nanoscale materials and biomolecular systems that support liquid-like fluctuations. Like its predecessors, this meeting will feature presentation of unpublished results by leading figures at the frontiers of chemical physics, extended poster sessions, and the uniquely open and extended discussions characteristic of Gordon Conferences. Unlike its predecessors, this meeting will also feature a two-day Gordon Research Seminar (GRS) in order to promote participation of young investigators and to enhance their engagement in the larger meeting. Four participants will be selected from the GRS and GRC poster sessions to present short talks in the main GRC program.