The role of collective motion in examples of coarsening and self-assembly.

The simplest prescription for building a patterned structure from its constituents is to add particles, one at a time, to an appropriate template. However, self-organizing molecular and colloidal systems in nature can evolve in much more hierarchical ways. Specifically, constituents (or clusters of constituents) may aggregate to form clusters (or clusters of clusters) that serve as building blocks for later stages of assembly.

Far-from-equilibrium measurements of thermodynamic length.

Thermodynamic length is a path function that generalizes the notion of length to the surface of thermodynamic states. Here, we show how to measure thermodynamic length in far-from-equilibrium experiments using the work fluctuation relations. For these microscopic systems, it proves necessary to define the thermodynamic length in terms of the Fisher information.

Effect of ion distribution on conductivity of block copolymer electrolytes.

Energy-filtered transmission electron microscopy (EFTEM) was used to determine the distribution of lithium ions in solid polymer electrolytes for lithium batteries. The electrolytes of interest are mixtures of bis(trifluoromethane)sulfonimide lithium salt and symmetric poly(styrene-block-ethylene oxide) copolymers (SEO). In contrast to current solid and liquid electrolytes, the conductivity of SEO/salt mixtures increases with increasing molecular weight of the copolymers.

Length of time's arrow.

An unresolved problem in physics is how the thermodynamic arrow of time arises from an underlying time reversible dynamics. We contribute to this issue by developing a measure of time-symmetry breaking, and by using the work fluctuation relations, we determine the time asymmetry of recent single molecule RNA unfolding experiments. We define time asymmetry as the Jensen-Shannon divergence between trajectory probability distributions of an experiment and its time-reversed conjugate.

Diagrammatic kinetic theory for a lattice model of a liquid. II. Comparison of theory and simulation results.

We compare the predictions of the mean field, the two site multiple scattering, and the simple mode coupling approximation developed in the previous paper for the dynamics of a tagged particle in an excluded volume lattice gas with the results of computer simulations. The tagged particle has a transition rate of gamma while the background particles have transition rates of alphagamma. We consider the tracer diffusion coefficient and the incoherent intermediate scattering function (IISF) for low, intermediate, and high concentrations of particles and for simple square and cubic lattices.

Diagrammatic kinetic theory for a lattice model of a liquid. I. Theory.

We present a diagrammatic formalism for the time correlation functions of density fluctuations for an excluded volume lattice gas on a simple d-dimensional hypercubic lattice. We consider a multicomponent system in which particles of different species can have different transition rates. Our theoretical approach uses a Hilbert space formalism for the time dependent dynamical variables of a stochastic process that satisfies the detailed balance condition.