| Wed May 18th 2022 16:00 – 17:30 ZH286 | Seminar | There is plenty of room in Soft Science Wim van Saarloos |
Details:70 years ago, Feynman wrote an inspiring article entitled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”, in which he foresaw the enormous possibilities of the miniaturization of information technology. Semiconductor industry and nanotechnology are the present epitomes of Feynman’s vision and of the power of reducing the scale of structures to the size of atoms. Soft matter science, a field which has emerged over the last few decades, focusses on easily deformable – hence soft – matter which is typically composed of special types of molecules or micron sized grains and droplets which self-organize into special structures or phases. Their amazing properties usually emerge from the molecules or particles being small and by our increasing ability to manipulate their properties. But as I will discuss in this talk, in order to take advantage of the unique new possibilities of soft matter, we should not make the constituent building blocks too small either! | ||
