The idea of this summer school is to create a friendly learning atmosphere, to enable open communication between students and lecturers, and create opportunities for students to make lasting contacts with peers at other universities.
Topics for 2024:
| Chris Rycroft, University of Wisconsin |
Computational geometry for soft matter. This lecture series will provide a survey of computational techniques for analyzing soft matter across scales. The series will begin at the particle level, and introduce geometrical methods for analyzing the structure of particle packings, with a particular focus on the Voronoi tessellation. For a given set of particles in a domain, each particle has an associated Voronoi cell, defined as an irregular polyhedron containing the space closer to that particle than any other. Features of Voronoi cells such as their volume, centroid, and number of faces have been widely used to gain insight into soft matter systems. In addition, the lectures will highlight how the complete topology of the Voronoi cells can be statistically analyzed to identify grain boundaries, phase transitions, and other features. The series will then discuss methods for coarse-graining, whereby particle-level information can be analyzed at the mesoscopic scale to inform continuum models. The lectures will finish by exploring geometrical ideas in continuum modeling, such as tracking deformation and strain, and generating computational meshes. The lectures will introduce several open-source software libraries, and provide a number of hands-on examples and data sets. | |||
| Efi Efrati, Weizmann Institute |
Geometric frustration and the intrinsic approach in soft matter. Geometric frustration is all around us; it is what gives tempered glass its strength, and puts ruffles on the edge of a torn plastic sheet. It is commonplace in a wide variety of soft matter systems including liquid crystals, biological structures and molecular crystals. In short, Geometric frustration arises whenever the constituents in a physical assembly or a material locally favor an arrangement that cannot be globally propagated. As any realization of such a system inevitably contains some compromise (which could be very cooperative in nature) understanding the ground state and response properties of frustrated systems can be challenging. In this lecture series we will learn how to formalize an elastic theory for a system that has no stress free reference configuration using differential geometry, and specialize in frustrated thin elastic sheets. We will use the same guiding principles of an intrinsic geometric description to describe frustrated liquid crystals. We will then generalize the approach for arbitrary frustrated Hamiltonian systems, and provide tools to quantify the strength of frustration and its outcome. Time permitting, we will use the intrinsic approach to unravel the mystery of viscoelastic instabilities. |
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| Karen Daniels, North Carolina State University | The dense granular state. Dense granular materials fundamentally lie at the margins of stability, easily tweaked into either a rigid configuration or a catastrophic failure by small changes in loading. Even when solid, they are peculiar: their lack of cohesion (and therefore no tensile forces) means that they require external stresses in order to remain in that state. When we peer inside them to examine the interparticle forces that underlie their resistance to stress, we find a network of heterogeneous forces with structures of many strengths and sizes. Our lectures and hands-on activities will cover both rigidity and flow of dense materials, including theoretical models describing these states and some key optical methods for taking measurements at the particle scale. | |||
| Sidney Nagel, University of Chicago |
Memory, aging, and training in materials. Memory and forgetting, teaching and learning, training and retraining are concepts that emerge out of our daily experience. While they seem at first to be essentially biological activities, by taking appropriate cues from the world of biology one can see how these concepts can be applied also to physical matter – matter that did not form via an evolutionary pathway or route of adaptation. Examples of training exist from antiquity – a sheet of paper can be repeatedly folded until it falls apart at the creases. But such an example does not begin to exploit the potential richness that training can convey to a material: there are systems that are useful only because of the way in which they were initially manipulated; some that learn as they are repetitively strained between two states; others that store many memories initially and then forget all but one; and, alas as is most often the case, materials that accumulate the wear and tear of previous everyday use to provide a rich and detailed history of their existence…These few examples show that there are many ways in which physical matter mimics the biological world. Material memories can be achieved in a variety of ways…These lectures will give a far-from-complete overview of different types of memory that can be implanted along with some discussion of the possible ways in which the memories can be stored. They will also describe how manipulation or aging a material can create new functionality that does not require precision design in its production; that is, the function can be achieved after deployment, and it may even be possible subsequently to erase the memory and then implant a new one for a different functionality. There are even some forms of training that appear to confer meta-properties to a material such as adaptability – that is, not simply the ability to do some specific task, but the ability to change function rapidly. The hope is that focusing on memory formation and the ability of a material to store information, may be a productive new way to think about condensed matter systems. |
Format:
For 2024, the Summer School will have a fully in-person format. The school will be a 5-day residential program running from noon on Sunday, June 2 to Thursday Evening, June 6, 2024. Four lecturers will give mini-courses composed of four 90-min lectures. The lectures will be interspersed with student presentations, and some social activities. Typically, we will have four lectures a day, leaving time for discussions scientific and otherwise. The lecturers may set assignments. More details on the courses will appear here closer to the date of the school.
Location:
UMass Amherst, the flagship campus of the University of Massachusetts system, is located in the scenic Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts, a 2-hour drive from Boston and 3 hours from New York City. The area is home to UMass and to four other liberal arts colleges. The area has a rich cultural environment in a rural setting. There are also a number of outdoor activities to fill in your free time – hiking and biking trails criss-cross the area.
Logistics:
There will be a fee of $475 for attending the school. The fee will cover on-campus lodging at UMass, breakfast, lunch and refreshments, as well as two evening meals. On other evenings, we will leave you to explore the eateries, bars, coffee-shops of Amherst and neighboring Northampton. The town is a 15 minute walk from campus, and there is free public transportation connecting the university and the town. For local students who do not require housing, the application fee is reduced to $175. To apply to attend the summer school, fill out the application at the Apply tab above. The priority deadline to apply is April 12, 2024.
Posters:
All participants are encouraged to bring a poster describing the research they are involved in or going on in their research groups. These posters do not need to report new or finished research results, and can be less formal than posters you would present at a regular conference. We will have one or more poster sessions, where you can find out about what is happening at other universities.