Speaker:  Miranda Holmes-Cerfon, Courant Institute

URL for Speaker:  http://cims.nyu.edu/~holmes/

Location:  LSK 460

Intended Audience:  IAM members

Nature has solved the problem, and now engineers would like to — how can we design small components to spontaneously form more complicated structures? To answer this question theoretically requires a way to describe the configuration space and assembly pathways of components with given interactions. For many systems of interest (e.g. colloids) these interactions are very short-ranged compared to the size of the components, so traditional approaches to energy landscapes struggle to capture the relevant dynamics. We propose a new framework to look at particles with short-ranged interactions and illustrate with several applications, such as computing the free energy landscape and transition rates for clusters of spheres, experimentally measuring the hydrodynamic interactions between colloids, and enumerating rigid packings of hard spheres.