This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). Many natural and synthetic systems involve ordered arrangements of units on two-dimensional surfaces. Examples include viral protein capsids, fullerenes, membranes and colloidosomes, which are colloidal-particle arrangements on the surface of a spherical drop. This Faculty Early Career Award funds a project that will experimentally address the role played by both the characteristics of the underlying surface, which dictates certain broad features of the defect structure that can arise within the particular ordering, and the minimization of energy, which in the end controls the detailed structure of the ordered material. By developing new methodologies based on microfluidics to generate spherical and non-spherical closed surfaces, this project will address this interplay and unravel its consequences. Beside possible applications in biological systems, controlling the resultant defect structure can lead to functional particles, since the defects can be functionalized to provide directional bonding capabilities; as a result, colloidal superatoms might be designed with specific shapes and valency for use in building supermolecules and novel bulk materials. A strong effort will be focused on developing a substantial educational and outreach program synergistically with the research component of the project. For this, a new course to present recent fundamental advances in Soft Condensed Matter will be developed and offered to undergraduate and graduate students at GaTech. In addition, by involving the Fernbank Science Center in Atlanta, this project will enable the dissemination of the geometrical and physical aspects involved through outreach activities aimed at high school students and the general public; the experimental character of the project and the visual appeal of the expected results will serve to effectively communicate the otherwise abstract outcomes of the project.
This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). Many natural and synthetic systems involve ordered arrangements of units on two-dimensional spaces. Examples include viral protein capsids, fullerenes, membranes and colloidosomes, which are colloidal-particle arrangements on the surface of a spherical drop. This Faculty Early Career Award funds a project that will experimentally address the role played by both the topology of the underlying surface and its detailed curvature. Topology dictates certain broad features of the topological-defect structure of the ground state, but the curvature-driven energetics controls the detailed structure of the ordered phase. By developing new methodologies based on microfluidic flows to generate closed surfaces with zero and non-zero genus, this project will address this interplay and unravel its consequences. Beside possible applications in biological systems, the experimental control and tunability of the resultant defect structure can lead to particles with a valency, since the defects can be functionalized to create ligands with directional bonding capabilities; as a result, mesoscale superatoms might be designed with specific shapes and valency for use as building blocks of supermolecules and novel bulk materials. A strong effort will be focused on developing a substantial educational and outreach program synergistically with the research component of the project. For this, a new course to present recent fundamental advances in Soft Condensed Matter will be developed and offered to undergraduate and graduate students at GaTech. In addition, by involving the Fernbank Science Center in Atlanta, this project will enable the dissemination of the geometrical and physical concepts involved through outreach activities aimed at high school students and the general public; the experimental character of the project and the visual appeal of the expected results will aid this goal.
