University of Toronto
                  PDE/Applied Math/Analysis Seminar
                    Friday 12 January, 3:10-4:00pm
                          6183 Bahen Center      


SPEAKER:  Michael Brenner

TITLE:    Mathematical issues and opportunities in self assembly

ABSTRACT: Self assembly refers to the dream of being able to mix small
	  components in a jar and have them spontaneously assemble
	  into a functional device. The primary obstacle with making
	  this work in practice is that in general a set of N
	  interacting objects have a large number of metastable
	  states, which grows rapidly with N. In principle this can be
	  dealt with by either designing the energy function so that
	  there is only a unique equilibrium state or by tuning the
	  dynamics so that the desired equilibrium is accessed from a
	  specified initial conditions. Both of these methods require
	  a close interplay between mathematics and
	  experimentation. This talk will summarize opportunities in
	  this field, and also discuss two examples of our recent
	  research in this direction: First we discuss a method for
	  assembling uniquely specified packings of spheres where the
	  non- uniqueness problem does not exist; secondly we discuss
	  the self assembly of a flat elastic sheet into a closed
	  shell, and estimate the dependence of the number of
	  metastable states on the shape of the flat sheet.




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University of Toronto PDE/Applied Math/Analysis Seminar 
http://www.math.toronto.edu/appmath/

2006-2007 organizers:
          Pieter Blue           pblue@ math.toronto.edu
          Almut Burchard        almut@ math.toronto.edu
          Robert McCann		mccann@ math.toronto.edu
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