Organizing Committee
- Mark Bowick
Syracuse University - Michael Brenner
Harvard University - Miranda Holmes-Cerfon
CIMS - Rob Kusner
University of Massachusetts, Amherst - Charles Radin
University of Texas at Austin
Abstract
This workshop will explore emergent phenomena in the context of small clusters, supramolecular self-assembly and the shape of self-assembled structures such as polymer vesicles. The emphasis will be on surprises which arise when common conditions are not satisfied, for instance when the number of components is small, or they are highly non-spherical, or there are several types of components. Interactions vary from hard sphere repulsion to competition between coarse-grained liquid-crystalline ordering competing with shape deformation.
Examples of this behavior are common in materials such as bulk homopolymers (rubber), copolymers, liquid crystals and colloidal aggregates. A basic mathematical setting would be to consider small clusters of hard spheres with isotropic short-range attractions and study the shape of the clusters as a function of the number of components. One known surprise is that highly symmetric structures are suppressed by rotational entropy.
This emphasizes the need to accurately count the number of particle configurations that lead to the same final state. Small clusters can also generate anisotropic building blocks which can in turn serve as nano- or meso-scale building blocks for supermolecules and bulk materials (supramolecular chemistry) freed from the limited scope of atoms and quantum-mechanical bonding. These structures frequently possess topological defects in their ground states because they lower the energy. The challenge is to determine the shape and equilibrium defect structure of such superatoms and the number and geometry of their arrangement.
The number of defects determines the effective valence of the super atoms and the global geometry of their arrangement determines the types of directional bonding possible when defects are linked together. The phenomenon of the appearance of singularities/defects because they are minimizers not necessarily required by topology or boundary conditions is also encountered in the study of harmonic maps. Moving up to self-assembly of large numbers of units, block copolymers self-assemble into a wide variety of structures including vesicles, nano-fibers and tori.
Many of the structures formed are essentially two-dimensional surfaces embedded in R3. The mathematical challenge is to find both the shape and the order of the assembled object. This requires minimizing of a functional that depends on both the local and global order of the relevant matter fields and the shape of the surface.

Confirmed Speakers & Participants
Talks will be presented virtually or in-person as indicated in the schedule below.
- Speaker
- Poster Presenter
- Attendee
- Virtual Attendee
-
David Aristoff
Colorado State University
-
Amir Azadi
University of Massachusetts
-
Mark Bowick
Syracuse University
-
Michael Brenner
Harvard University
-
Maria Cameron
University of Maryland
-
Paul Chaikin
New York University
-
Beth Chen
Harvard University
-
Bryan Chen
University of Massachusetts
-
Henry Cohn
Microsoft Research New England
-
Lucy Colwell
University of Cambridge
-
Robert Connelly
Cornell University
-
Ivan Corwin
Columbia University
-
Codina Cotar
University College London
-
Scott Crass
California State University
-
Udaya Dahal
University of Connecticut
-
Gustavo During
Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile
-
Kari Eloranta
Aalto University
-
Emre Esenturk
University of Pittsburgh
-
Tingyue Gan
University of Maryland
-
Sharon Glotzer
University of Michigan
-
Vadim Gorin
MIT
-
Steven Gortler
Harvard
-
Gregory Grason
University of Massachusetts
-
Doron Grossman
Hebrew University
-
Jemal Guven
National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM)
-
Robert Hardt
Rice University
-
Michael Harrison
Pennsylvania State University
-
Tyler Helmuth
University of British Columbia
-
Silke Henkes
University of Aberdeen
-
Miranda Holmes-Cerfon
CIMS
-
Ewa Infeld
Dartmouth College
-
Sabine Jansen
Ruhr-Universität Bochum
-
Yoav Kallus
Sante Fe Institute
-
Randall Kamien
University of Pennsylvania
-
Hridesh Kedia
University of Chicago
-
Richard Kenyon
Brown University
-
Sarah Kostinski
Harvard University
-
Daniel Kral
University of Warwick
-
Madison Krieger
Brown University
-
Rob Kusner
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
-
Woden Kusner
Graz University of Technology
-
Jeffrey Lagarias
University of Michigan
-
Zhongyang Li
University of Connecticut
-
Marcin Lis
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
-
L. Mahadevan
Harvard University
-
Apala Majumdar
University of Bath
-
Vinothan Manoharan
Harvard University
-
Oksana Manyuhina
Syracuse University
-
Cristina Marchetti
Syracuse University
-
Sabetta Matsumoto
Princeton University
-
Qingyou Meng
University of Massachusetts
-
Sevak Mkrtchyan
University of Rochester
-
Athina Panotopoulou
Dartmouth College
-
Jayson Paulose
Rijksuniversiteit te Leiden
-
Charles Radin
University of Texas at Austin
-
Sanjay Ramassamy
Brown University
-
Emily Russell
Harvard University
-
Itai Shafrir
Technion-Israel Institute of Technology
-
Suraj Shankar
Syracuse University
-
Arjun Sharma
University of New Orleans
-
Eran Sharon
Hebrew University
-
Senya Shlosman
Aix-Marseille University
-
Meera Sitharam
University of Florida
-
Rastko Sknepnek
University of Dundee
-
Daniel Stein
New York University
-
John Sullivan
Technische Universitat Berlin
-
Yiwei Sun
University of Massachusetts
-
Yu-Hang Tang
Brown University
-
Erin Teich
University of Michigan
-
Louis Theran
Aalto University
-
Sophie Trastour
Harvard SEAS
-
David Wales
University of Cambridge
-
Shawn Walker
Louisiana State University
-
Xuan Wang
University of North Carolina
-
Samuel Watson
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
-
Peter Winkler
Dartmouth College
-
Thomas Yu
Drexel University
Workshop Schedule
Monday, March 16, 2015
Tuesday, March 17, 2015
Wednesday, March 18, 2015
Thursday, March 19, 2015
Friday, March 20, 2015
Associated Semester Workshops
Statistical Mechanics and Combinatorics (ongoing semester course)
