Ahmed Elbanna's Homepage !
I have a dream......
I would not exaggerate if I said that I am lucky for being in a wonderful scientific environment like Caltech and for having such a creative, knowledgeable and supportive adviser like Prof. Thomas Heaton. This wonderful combination which I believe to be a gift from Allah has provided me with a unique opportunity for fullfilling my scientific dreams and for maturing my scientific character by tackling challenging and exciting problems . In my current research, I aim at finding a new methodology to interpret the physics of earthquake rupture using the methods of statistical physics. The current limitations in the available computational resources make it unfeasible to uncover the true form of the scaling laws that control the behavior of the different variables encountered in the rupture process as we can not go beyond a few orders of length scale magnitudes. Our approach bridges this computational gap through presenting innovative statistical models describing the variation of the stress in the earth crust, the resulting slip when an earthquake occurs and the relation between theses two (the slip and the stress). Our work is unique in the sense that we are introducing a complete framework based solely on fractals, the thing which imposes challenging difficultie as to how to deal with non-differentiable quantities but meanwhile presents an intilligent tool in explaing many earthquake scaling laws. I could say we are still in the project's initial phase but things are moving on and hopefully the outcome would be very beneficial for physicists and geophysicists who are challenged by the mysteries of earthquake mechanics but are tied with the current computational capabilities. You could find an outline for my current research project here.
