The methods used in soft matter theory are not found in your standard graduate school courses. This can make it difficult to get your foot in the door when it comes time to start research. Luckily, there are a growing number of programs designed to emphasize topics that are useful to us. In late June, […]
Group member Andrew DB stopped by Somerville High School on Tuesday to share with students his path to becoming a PhD physicist. His discussion touched upon opportunities available to physicists, the challenges of decision-making early in one’s career, research in soft matter, and clean energy policy. After the brief talk, an extended Q&A session allowed students to […]
In collaboration with Andrea Rodarte and Linda Hirst from UC Merced, Andrew and Tim published a new paper in Phys Rev E last week. The paper uses simulation techniques developed by Andrew to better understand the deformation and chaining behavior of soft shells in a nematic liquid crystal solvent. These shells, which are formed by clustering nanoparticles, […]
The SoftMatterTheory group of Department of Physics and Astronomy of Tufts University, led by Timothy J. Atherton accompanied by Mathew Giso and Zhaoyu Xie, went to Somerville High School to help judge the projects of the annual Science and Engineering Fair on a lovely morning of March 1, 2018. We spent a wonderful time talking […]
Fenway High School has a longstanding partnership with the Museum of Science. Students regularly spend portions of the school day there throughout the year, and every December the museum hosts the school’s science fair. This year had ~70 participants covering a wide range of topics, and I spent my Friday morning helping to judge the event.
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We’re delighted to announce the publication of a new paper in collaboration with Applied Mathematicians at Tufts, Oxford and Memorial University of Newfoundland. This paper considers the intriguing problem of cholesteric liquid crystals (that naturally form helical structures) in cylinders of elliptical cross section. The results illustrate a mathematical technique, referred to as deflation, that […]
The ongoing collaboration between our SoftMatterTheory team and the Spicer group at the University of New South Wales unveiled its most recent work last week in a publication in Soft Matter. The paper, authored by Prerna Dahiya of the Spicer group, adds to her existing work characterizing the coalescence of oil droplets. Specifically, she found […]
