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 Droplet’s Adventure in Quantumland
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  Ms. Chinmayee Mishra*
Email: chinmayee.mishra@students.iiserpune.ac.in
Pitter patter, pitter patter, listen to the rain. OPitter patter, pitter patter, on the windowpane.
h, you’ve all seen the beautiful raindrops sliding against the glass windowpanes and, out come the
mobile phones from our pockets! Click-click, from this angle; snap-snap, this one will go to Instagram; and, definitely don’t forget the lone droplet about to fall from the window frame. Increase the brightness, tweak the contrast and voila! ‘50 likes’ and ’10 comments’ later, soon forgotten are the droplets and cursed is the rain for daring to trap us indoors.
But scientists can’t forget. We fixate, dissect, calculate until everything there is to be known is known! Those beautiful and round rain droplets are no exception. So next time
your nerdy little cousin catches you off-guard asking, “How do the droplets form?’ You can be ready.
Let’s take a single water droplet. It, obviously, has more molecules in it than a number you can imagine . These water molecules like to remain closer to other water molecules or in other words, they attract each other. Most of them are surrounded by each other, cocooned in their watery environment. But there are those water molecules, which are on the surface of the droplets, always being touched by the air or precisely, the air molecules. Even the air molecules and water molecules would like to remain close. There emerges a continuous tug-of-war between the inner water molecules and the outer air molecules to attract the surface water
 * Ms. Chinmayee Mishra, PhD Scholar from Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune, is pursuing her research on “Theoretical Ultracold Atomic Physics”. Her popular science story entitled “Droplet’s Adventure in Quantum land” has been selected for AWSAR Award.
























































































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