Alex Travesset
Assistant Professor of Physics
Iowa State University and Ames Lab
Our everyday life revolves around big complex molecules. Phospholipids form a container that protects the inside of our cell, proteins are the molecules that perform most cellular functions, polymers are long organic molecules that are used in plastics, tires or rubber erasers, amphiphiles are the main component of soaps, and almost all the food we eat is made of big molecules. Soft condensed matter aims to predict theoretically the different phases, structures or states that all these big complex molecules form and describe their physical properties. In this talk, I will present a general overview of the field of soft condensed matter and discuss some concrete examples that my group is currently investigating; those include signalling phospholipids, nanoparticles and polymers, ionic conductance in silica channels and crystal or liquid crystalline phases in curved interfaces. Time permitting, I will introduce new computational tools based on new hardware architectures that enable unpredented fast and cheap high performance calculations.