Related papers: Inverse Thermodynamics: Designing Interactions for…
Self-assembly processes provide the means to achieve scalable and versatile metamaterials by "bottom-up" fabrication. Despite their enormous potential, especially as a platform for energy materials, self-assembled metamaterials are often…
Inverse design of morphing slender structures with programmable curvature has significant applications in various engineering fields. Most existing studies formulate it as an optimization problem, which requires repeatedly solving the…
Interacting-Particle Reaction Dynamics (iPRD) simulates the spatiotemporal evolution of particles that experience interaction forces and can react with one another. The combination of interaction forces and reactions enable a wide range of…
Modern experimental methods enable the creation of self-assembly building blocks with tunable interactions, but optimally exploiting this tunability for the self-assembly of desired structures remains an important challenge. Many studies of…
A challenge in designing self-assembling building blocks is to ensure the target state is both thermodynamically stable and kinetically accessible. These two objectives are known to be typically in competition, but it is not known how to…
One of the fundamental goals of nanotechnology is to exploit selective and directional interactions between molecules to design particles that self-assemble into desired structures, from capsids, to nano-clusters, to fully formed crystals…
Phase-separated biomolecular condensates exhibit a wide range of dynamical properties, which depend on the sequences of the constituent proteins and RNAs. However, it is unclear to what extent condensate dynamics can be tuned without also…
The adaptive and surprising emergent properties of biological materials self-assembled in far-from-equilibrium environments serve as an inspiration for efforts to design nanomaterials and their properties. In particular, controlling the…
Amorphous (disordered) materials are solids that have shown great potential in various domains, including energy storage, thermal management, and advanced materials. Unlike crystalline materials that can be described by unit cells…
This thesis is devoted to the study of physical systems embedded within the field of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics. Specifically, the state of the systems of interest constitutes a stochastic process that can be externally driven by…
The thermodynamic framework of repeated interactions is generalized to an arbitrary open quantum system in contact with a heat bath. Based on these findings the theory is then extended to arbitrary measurements performed on the system. This…
Subwavelength photonic structures and metamaterials provide revolutionary approaches for controlling light. The inverse design methods proposed for these subwavelength structures are vital to the development of new photonic devices.…
Self-assembly in the laboratory can now yield `information-rich' nanostructures in which each component is of a distinct type and has a defined spatial position. Ensuring the thermodynamic stability of such structures requires…
Meta-optics have rapidly become a major research field within the optics and photonics community, strongly driven by the seemingly limitless opportunities made possible by controlling optical wavefronts through interaction with arrays of…
Understanding the complex self-assembly of biomacromolecules is a major outstanding question. Microtubules are one example of a biopolymer that possesses characteristics quite distinct from standard synthetic polymers that are derived from…
Conventional wisdom presumes that low-coordinated crystal ground states require directional interactions. Using our recently introduced optimization procedure to achieve self-assembly of targeted structures (Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 228301…
Providing dry solid contacts with on-demand macroscale frictional behaviour remains a formidable challenge in tribology, haptics or robotics. Metainterfaces created from surfaces with engineered asperity-based topographies can achieve such…
Optimal (reversible) processes in thermodynamics can be modelled as step-by-step processes, where the system is successively thermalized with respect to different Hamiltonians by an external thermal bath. However, in practice interactions…
Topological defects play a central role in the physics of many materials, including magnets, superconductors and liquid crystals. In active fluids, defects become autonomous particles that spontaneously propel from internal active stresses…
In self-assembling systems, geometric frustration leads to complex states characterized by internal gradients of shape misfit. Frustrated assemblies have drawn recent interest due to the unique possibility that their thermodynamics can…