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Thursday, April 17, 2025
2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
CNLS Conference Room (TA-3, Bldg 1690)

Seminar

Riddles of the sphinx: chirality, entropy, and thermodynamics

Prof. Greg Huber
University of California San Francisco

Are there emergent laws governing the interactions of chiral building blocks subject to constraints in space and time? I’ll explore these questions in a crowded 2D space using the sphinx tile — a simple, non-symmetrical shape composed of six triangles which possesses some unique and minimal properties. It comes in left-handed and right-handed enantiomers, and I’ll explore this toy model under spatial forcing, so that it creates various types of order, including crystalline, quasicrystalline, mixed, and fully disordered states. A succession of exact methods are devised to find these states. For large systems, the numbers of configurations become so large that statistical mechanics holds and thermodynamic quantities can be calculated. A Monte Carlo method based on fundamental shapes (“f-polyads”) has been developed to sample typical states. These explorations into chirality raise a number of new mysteries which will be discussed.

Teams: Join the meeting now
Meeting ID: 235 776 838 966
Passcode: 57Z4iQ23

Host: Chris Fryer (CNLS)