Colloidal Crystals, Quasicrystals and the Entropic Bond: Sharon Glotzer

Sharon Glotzer (University of Michigan) presents at the Fred Kavli Special Symposium: From Unit Cell to Biological Cell at the APS March Meeting 2019 in Boston, MA. View abstract below. ------------------------------------------------- Colloidal Crystals, Quasicrystals and the Entropic Bond ------------------------------------------------- Entropy, information, and order are important concepts in many fields, relevant for materials to machines, for biology to economics. Entropy is typically associated with disorder; yet, the counterintuitive notion that particles with no interactions other than excluded volume might self-assemble from a fluid phase into an ordered crystal has been known since the mid-20th century. First predicted for rods, and then spheres, the ordering of hard shapes by nothing more than crowding is now well established. In recent years, surprising discoveries of entropically ordered colloidal crystals of extraordinary structural complexity have been predicted by computer sim