News and Events
Fall 2009 Seminars
A Cornucopia of Particle Packings:
From Hard Spheres to Ellipses and from Polymer Packings to Folded Proteins
Corey O’Hern
Department of Mechanical Engineering & Physics
Yale University
Thursday, October 29, 2009
10:00 - 11:00 a.m.
102 Chemistry Building
Abstract
In this talk, I will survey my recent computational and
theoretical studies of static particle packings with different
particle shapes and interactions, dimensionalities, boundary
conditions, and constraints. In particular, I will highlight three
interesting results:
- The bulk shear rigidity of packings composed of ellipsoidal particles is much weaker than that for spherical particles;
- Systems composed of ellipsoidal particles have intriguing nonequilibrium phases such as those with liquid-like rotational degrees of freedom (DOF), but frozen translational DOF; and
- The exact size and structure of model collapsed polymers depends on preparation history, however, there are several robust features of the probability distributions that are only weakly sensitive to the preparation protocol.