Many of the materials of great interest and importance for society - including magnets, novel materials for solar energy conversion, biological or biologically inspired materials, and superconductors - exhibit "emergence": their unique and important properties emerge from their subunits such as atoms or proteins in an unforeseen manner from experimental observation. A sensible goal is to elucidate mathematically precise descriptions of the organizing principles describing these phenomena to guide future discovery. This understanding requires an integration of approaches from many disciplines such as physics, biology, chemistry, and engineering, and no one institution - or nation - has the expertise to fully understand these organizing principles by themselves. The Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter brings together distinguished senior scientists from across the US and abroad to cutting edge workshops on emergent phenomena in quantum matter (such as cold atomic condensates and superconductors), soft matter (such as self-replicating materials and active fluids), and biological matter (such as self-assembling biomolecule matrices and quantitative neuroscience) with a goal toward making substantive progress on advancing our understanding of these important problems. These workshops fully integrate young graduate students and postdoctoral researchers to assure that the next generation of emergent materials scientists will be immersed in the process.
All the ICAM workshops are discussion oriented (at least half the time is set aside for discussion), must include an explicit plan for active participation and engagement of junior scientists, for interaction between senior scientists from diverse disciplines, for video archiving of lectures, and for production of an overview paper from the workshop. When appropriate, workshop organizers must develop a plan to develop inputs to the materials genome initiative for placement of relevant data and software. Workshops are decided in consultation with the ICAM Science Steering committee from among: (i) spin-orbit supermaterials in solids and cold atom condensates, (ii) digital design of quantum materials, (iii) self-replicating materials, (iv) active materials (such as fluids with engineered swimming particles), (v) self-assembly of biological materials for materials applications, (vi) materials science interplay with the quantitative understanding of the brain, or (vii) important new topics proposed by the emergent matter community.
This award is supported jointly by the Condensed Matter Physcis and Biomaterials Programs in the Division of Materials Research, the Physics of Living Systems and Computational Physics Programs in the Division of Physics, and the Molecular Biophysics Program in the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences
