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We investigate the abiotic production of oxygen and its photochemical byproduct ozone through water vapor photolysis in moist atmospheres of temperate terrestrial exoplanets. The amount of water vapor available for photolysis in the middle…
The habitable zone is the main tool that mission architectures utilize to select potentially habitable planets for follow up spectroscopic observation. Given its importance, the precise size and location of the habitable zone remains a hot…
Understanding the possible climatic conditions on rocky extrasolar planets, and thereby their potential habitability, is one of the major subjects of exoplanet research. Determining how the climate, as well as potential atmospheric…
Results are presented from a 3-D Pluto general circulation model (GCM) that includes conductive heating and cooling, non-local thermodynamic equilibrium (non-LTE) heating by methane at 2.3 and 3.3 microns, non-LTE cooling by cooling by…
Surfaces are able to control physical-chemical processes in multi-component solution systems and, as such, find application in a wide range of technological devices. Understanding the structure, dynamics and thermodynamics of non-ideal…
In the standard treatment of heterogeneous nucleation on a surface, the energy of the surface is assumed to be homogeneous. Often its value is obtained from some macroscopic measurement. We ask the question what happens if we consider the…
Atmospheric convection behaves differently in hydrogen-rich atmospheres compared to higher mean molecular weight atmospheres due to compositional gradients of tracers. Previous 1D studies predict that when a condensible tracer exceeds a…
Over 4 billion years ago, Earth is thought to have been a hazy world akin to Saturn's moon Titan. The organic hazes in the atmosphere at this time could contain a vast inventory of life's building blocks, and thus may have seeded warm…
Almost all planetary atmospheres are affected by disequilibrium chemical processes. In this paper we introduce our recently developed Chemical Kinetic Model (\texttt{ChemKM}). We show that the results of our HD189733b model are in good…
The issue of ice accumulation at low-temperature circumstances causes multiple problems and serious damages in many civil infrastructures which substantially influence human daily life. However, despite the significant consideration in…
Water vapour atmospheres with content equivalent to the Earth's oceans, resulting from impacts or a high insolation, were found to yield a surface magma ocean. This was, however, a consequence of assuming a fully convective structure. Here…
Reconciling the geology of Mars with models of atmospheric evolution remains a major challenge. Martian geology is characterized by past evidence for episodic surface liquid water, and geochemistry indicating a slow and intermittent…
The Moon-forming giant impact extensively melts and partially vaporizes the silicate Earth and delivers a substantial mass of metal to Earth's core. Subsequent evolution of the magma ocean and overlying atmosphere has been described by…
The spatial distributions of the valence-electron density and the total energy reliefs for water (or methanol) migration on the free surface of graphene are obtained, by using the electron density functional and ab initio pseudopotential…
There is accumulating evidence for the presence of complex molecules, including carbon-bearing and organic molecules, in the interstellar medium. Much of this evidence comes to us from studies of chemical composition, photo- and…
The origin of life on Earth would benefit from a prebiotic atmosphere that produced nitriles, like HCN, which enable ribonucleotide synthesis. However, geochemical evidence suggests that Hadean air was relatively oxidizing with negligible…
We study the global influence of curvature on the free energy landscape of two-dimensional binary mixtures confined on closed surfaces. Starting from a generic effective free energy, constructed on the basis of symmetry considerations and…
Quantum Monte Carlo simulations at zero temperature of a $^3$He monolayer adsorbed on graphite, either clean or preplated with $^4$He, unexpectedly point to a gas-liquid phase transition at a very low areal density of the order of…
Water wetting on a hydrophobic surface at ambient conditions is disallowed by the nonpolar nature of the surface and high vapor pressure of water. However, the presence of sub-millimeter sized hydrophilic patches allows the waxy wings of…
The atmospheres of small exoplanets likely derive from a combination of geochemical outgassing and primordial gases left over from formation. Secondary atmospheres, such as those of Earth, Mars and Venus, are sourced by outgassing.…