Physics Colloquium

Prof. Thomas Truskett, Department of Chemical Engineering, UT-Austin

"Inverse design of interactions for assembly"

4:00pm, The John A. Wheeler Lecture Hall (RLM 4.102). Coffee and cookies will be served at 3:45pm in RLM 4.102

Abstract: Nanometer-scale, colloidally-stable particles suspended in a fluid can be driven to assemble into a wide variety of different structures depending on the control parameters of the system and the nature of the effective interparticle interactions.  In many cases, the relevant interactions are tunable via external fields, physical or chemical modification of the particle surfaces, or changes in the composition of the suspending solvent. In this talk, we discuss some of the theoretical challenges associated with the inverse design of interactions for assembly into a targeted structure and the opportunities that new machine learning based simulation approaches provide for addressing them.