Physical Society Colloquium

Order through Disorder: Entropy Driven Self-Assembly

Zvonimir Dogic

Department of Physics
Brandeis University

Although the idea that entropy alone is sufficient to produce an ordered state is an old one, the notion remains counter-intuitive and it is often assumed that attractive interactions are necessary to generate phases with long-range order. In this talk I will describe how to rationally design the shape of the constituent particles in order to assemble phases of increasing complexity, ranging from conventional three-dimensional crystals and liquid crystals to more exotic structures such as one-dimensional twisted ribbons and two-dimensional membranes that fold into catenoids. Simple arguments demonstrate that all these structures maximize the overall entropy of the system.