Benjamin Widom

Benjamin Widom is the Goldwin Smith Professor of Chemistry Emeritus at Cornell University. He served as Chairman of the Department of Chemistry from 1978 to 1981. He is known for his work toward understanding the properties of substances near the critical point—the point at which two phases of the substance (water and water vapor, for example) lose their distinguishing features and behave as one, or at a tricritical point, where it is three previously distinct phases that lose their separate identities. In the 1960s, Widom derived so-called scaling relations, accounting for critical- point anomalies seen in experiments. His work is recognized as an important precursor to the renormalization-group theory of critical phenomena, for which Cornell colleague Kenneth Wilson was awarded the 1982 Nobel Prize in physics. Widom's potential-distribution theory, which allows researchers to calculate a fluid's chemical potential through computer simulation, was a major advance in the theory of fluids. He has also pioneered work on the structure and tension (surface tension) of the interface between two phases. More recently, he has extended that work to include line tension, which is the tension of the line at which three phases meet. Widom has received honorary doctorates from the University of Chicago and the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands.