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Event: The Jeanne and Martin Sussman Endowed Lecture in Chemical and Biological Engineering
Topic: Order, Disorder, and the Entropic Bond
Speaker: Dr. Sharon C. Glotzer, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Date: Wednesday, April 15
Time: 12:00-1:00 PM, with reception and lunch to follow
Location: Breed Memorial Hall, 51 Winthrop Street
RSVP required. Link available soon.
Entropy is typically associated with disorder, yet the counterintuitive notion that particles with no interactions other than excluded volume might self-assemble from a fluid phase into an ordered crystal has been known since the mid-20th century. First predicted for rods, then spheres, the thermodynamic ordering of hard shapes by nothing more than crowding is now well established. In recent years, surprising discoveries of entropically ordered colloidal crystals of extraordinary structural complexity have been predicted by computer simulation and observed in the laboratory. Colloidal quasicrystals, clathrate structures, and structures with large and complex unit cells typically associated with metal alloys can all self-assemble from disordered phases of identical particles due solely to entropy maximization. In this talk, we show how entropy alone can produce order and complexity beyond that previously imagined, both in colloidal crystal structure as well as in the kinetic pathways connectingfluid and crystal phases, and we show how tools use by the quantum community to predict atomic crystal structures can be used to predict entropic colloidal crystals.
About Dr. Glotzer:
Sharon C. Glotzer is the John W. Cahn Distinguished University Professor, the Stuart W. Churchill Collegiate Professor of Chemical Engineering, and the Anthony C. Lembke Department Chair of Chemical Engineering at the University of Michigan. Glotzer is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (2019), the National Academy of Sciences (2014), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2011), and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society, the American Institute for Chemical Engineers, and other organizations. Glotzer is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the 2019 Aneesur Rahman Prize for Computational Physics from the American Physical Society, the 2018 Nanoscale Science and Engineering Forum Award, and the 2016 Alpha Chi Sigma Award. With over 260 publications and more than 370 talks given around the globe, Glotzer is one of the world’s leading computational scientists.
About the Sussman Lecture:
Professor Emeritus Martin Sussman was a member of the Department of Chemical Engineering at Tufts University for 37 years. He taught thermodynamics to generations of Tufts engineering students, and captivated liberal arts majors with his lectures on the relationship between culture and technology. The Tufts community was deeply saddened by his passing on April 13, 2005.
The department was honored to receive a generous gift from the Estate of Professor Martin V. Sussman. This gift was named the Jeanne and Martin Sussman Endowed Fellowship and Lectureship Fund. Administered by the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, the fund provides an international fellowship for chemical and biological engineering undergraduates and a biennial chemical engineering lectureship series.