Spinning liquid droplets for modeling charged nuclei

Synopsis

A spinning drop of liquid that is magnetically levitated can exhibit many stable equilibrium states depending on the speed it spins at. For a neutrally charged spinning drop of liquid, an ellipsoidal or dumbbell-shape configuration is often observed below some critical angular frequency. In the case of a surface-charged non-spinning drop of liquid, the droplet will remain spherical below some critical charge. Above the critical charge, a sharp peak will emerge from the surface with daughter droplets being ejected from the host droplet. The liquid drop model is a very insightful model that is still usedtoday to study the stability of spinning astronomical objects or heavy charged nuclei. In this talk, I will discuss the effect of simultaneously imposing charge and rotation on a droplet of water based on a recent PRL paper [L. Liao and R. J. A. Hill, PRL 119, (2017) 114501].