ABSTRACT: The celebrated photograph of milk drop coronet by Harold Edgerton serves as a sole source of inspiration for the work to be presented. The effort to dissect the physics underlying the coronet formation led to a journey through various, seemingly disparate, phenomena, which the author and his students have been studying both experimentally and theoretically. Among the problems to be discussed are Rayleigh-Taylor instability of curved interfaces, disintegration of a retracting soap film, rectangular plate impact on water, impulse-driven drop on a membrane, acoustic reflection and refraction at fluid interfaces, Faraday waves on time-varying spatial domains, and transerve instability of cylindrical solitons. Via establishing a relation between these studies and the coronet problem, the rich multiple scale physics of the latter will be highlighted and, in particular, compressible, viscous, surface tension, and dynamical systems effects elucidated.

BIOSKETCH: Dr. Rouslan Krechetnikov (Ph.D. 2004, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology) is a Professor of Mathematics. Prior to rejoining the University of Alberta as a tenured Associate Professor, he was an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at UCSB (2009-2013), and spent a year (2007-2008) as an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the University of Alberta (Edmonton, Canada) and a year (2006-2007) at Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada). Dr. Krechetnikov was also a Postdoctoral Fellow at Caltech (2004-2006) with Jerry Marsden and UCSB (2002-2004) with Bud Homsy. Visiting Professor positions were held at UCSB (2013- 2015) and Caltech (2008-2009, 2023-2024). Dr. Krechetnikov combines theory and experiment in studying problems of mechanics and fluid dynamics at all scales. His work has been recognized by a number of honors and awards, among which are NSF CAREER (2011), DARPA Young Faculty Award (2011), Ig Nobel (2012), Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2014), and Research Fellowship at the University of Alberta (2015-2020).