Summer Research in the softmattertheory group

We were delighted to host Paco Navarro, a student from Harvey Mudd college in CA, as an undergraduate summer researcher. Here’s a guest blog post about his experience:—

This summer I was lucky enough to join Professor Atherton and his lab at Tufts University from my home institution of Harvey Mudd College through the VERSE program. I had previously done research in different aspects of the field of soft matter, primarily focusing on the mechanical properties of various elastomers, but the field of liquid crystals was unfamiliar to me.

For the first week and a half of the summer I was welcomed onto the team and I was learning Morpho through both the tutorial and solving problems like filament on a bubble and proving the electric field in a conductor is zero. After just a couple of days, I felt like I was starting to get the hang of it and after a couple of weeks, I was already teaching it to others in a workshop. The first few weeks really felt like learn, practice, teach style of learning which I really enjoyed. 

I was then able to do a deep dive into the field of cholesteric liquid crystals, more specifically I was looking at their behavior on curved surfaces. In order to examine the impacts of curvature, I used a continuum of unduloids as they progressed from a cylinder to a set of connected spheres. 

From here I was then able to simulate cholesteric liquid crystals while varying curvature to begin to characterize their relationship. We observed a variety of different behaviors when continuing results across curvatures such as a tendency to form a chiral structure and conformity to principal curvatures. We also simulated cholesterics on a sphere and plotted their walls, the point when the director changes directions, to get gorgeous morphologies like these:

I also got the chance to work on our first full 3-D cholesteric simulations! It was really cool and I was able to start mapping out the solution space of possible shapes that our droplets can form. One of the things I love about this research is that it allows me to utilize my training in physics, math, and computer science so it all feels more connected. Despite my main focus being research this summer, it certainly wasn’t all I got up to!

I ended up bonding a lot with one of my labmates, Hudson another undergraduate researcher. We have gotten burritos more times than I can count and stared at lines of code together for hours. We even to went to see all the summer blockbusters right by the Boston Commons! Despite being a complete outsider to this community, the Lab and the VERSE cohort welcomed me with open arms. It was truly an amazing experience 🙂