Dynamics of Colloidal Surfaces

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This award is made as the starter grant increment of Dr. Raymond Goldstein's Postdoctoral Fellowship in Chemistry Award in support of his research at Princeton University. The thrust of Dr. Goldstein's research is the study of the motion of colloidal surfaces such as cell membranes and nucleic acids. The spatial patterns formed by these surfaces generally occur on length scales larger than molecular, and may be described by a continuum elastic theory. The research involves the development of formalisms for such constrained variational dynamics dominated by dissipation. A first step toward understanding the role of surface geometry and elasticity in the motion involves a local description of the viscous dissipation as in the dynamics of an isolated Brownian particle. Generalizations of a recently developed approach for two-dimensional systems are envisioned for the study of closed polymers with bending and torsional energy and of membranes with diffusing impurities coupled to the local geometry, and to develop a finite-temperature Langevin dynamics for closed surfaces--a statistical mechanics of shapes.