Theoretical study of soft matter systems

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Soft matter is a cross disciplinary research field involving physics, chemistry, biology, and materials science. It studies physical systems that can be deformed relatively easily in response to external and internal physical and chemical conditions. Examples include colloids, polymers, gels, liquid crystals, and several biological systems. These materials compete with and sometimes outperform the traditional solid-state materials. Founded by pioneers such as Nobel Prize winner Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, soft matter theory is a field that has seen vast new developments in the last half century, in both fundamental and applied research.****     This proposal presents a comprehensive soft-matter-theory research program that integrates a number of important and challenging problems involving polymers, membranes, and liquid crystals. In our theoretical treatment, a common ground is the use of statistical physics in studying these systems. Some new directions include: the development of a framework for the Flory-Huggins interaction energy and incompressibility condition of semiflexible polymer melts consisting of molecules for which the orientational dependence is importance, the relevance of Rayleigh instability in defining the conformation of charged vesicles, the onset of Casimir force caused by fluctuating polymer densities on embedded particles, vesicle translocation kinetics, vesicle tabulation and pearling dynamics, DNA packing structure, transition kinetics between defect liquid-crystal states, and liquid-crystal polymers in confinement. The exciting discoveries based on this proposal will significantly advance the fundamental understanding of soft matter --- a playground for constructing new materials of tomorrow. ***      Over the last 10 years, my research group has developed cutting-edge tools that can be readily exploited to tackle these new directions. They include: the self-consistent field theory for wormlike polymer chains, three-dimensional vesicle modeling based on triangulation of a fluid surface, density-functional models for liquid-crystal systems, and Monte Carlo simulations based on Wang-Landau type weights. By its explicit design, this multifaceted research program is ideally suited for training MSc- and PhD-level graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. The research problems will intellectually challenge my research group hence the trained HQP in their pathways to make substantial impact in academic and industrial research. *** **