Séminaire

Mardi 14 Février 2017 à 11h00.

Finding Optimal Pathways for Cassie to Wenzel Transitions on Superhydrophobic Surfaces & Phase Separation on Bicontinuous Cubic Membranes

''This talk consists of two parts. First, I will describe a suite of methods designed to efficiently characterize the energy landscapes of continuum, Landau-type free energy models. Using transitions between Cassie and Wenzel states on superhydrophobic surfaces, I will show that the methods allow systematic study of not only the most relevant minimum energy configurations, but also the transition pathways between any two minima, as well as their corresponding energy barriers and transition state configurations. In fact, the methods are generic, and I will highlight how a wide range of problems can be tackled with this approach. In the second part of the talk, I will describe our recent work on bicontinuous cubic membranes, whereby the lipids form a triply periodic lipid bilayer that separates two percolating and non-intersecting water channels. Upon considering interaction between different species we find an interesting competition between a curvature favoured splitting and an interfacially favoured coalescing mechanism of single species domains. With increasing the line tension contribution, we also observe a facetting of the domains that we explain with a simple argument based on the symmetry of the underlying surface and topology.''