Description:

Dielectric polarization is omnipresent in soft-matter systems, as these systems often are comprised of organic materials suspended in water. In this talk, I will demonstrate how dielectric effects can be exploited to control self-assembly of colloidal building blocks, to modulate charge transport in complex media, to create self-propelling particles, and to study non-equilibrium phase behavior. Whereas in some geometries smart strategies can be used to create highly efficient computational methods for the simulation of these phenomena, other geometries require advanced approaches to make such simulations feasible. I will illustrate some of the advances made in recent years, and also discuss explicit experimental realizations of the phenomena uncovered.

Seminar Speaker: Erik Luijten, Northwestern University

 Host: Marko

Keywords: Physics, Astronomy, Seminar, Colloquium