Welcome Jyoti
Jyoti joined the group as a PhD student. She will be conducting research on the computational design of nanomaterials. Welcome!
Engel Lab
Jyoti joined the group as a PhD student. She will be conducting research on the computational design of nanomaterials. Welcome!
Harsha Namdeo joined the group as a PhD student. She will be conducting research on understanding interactions and self-assembly behavior of nanoparticles. Welcome!
For the month of April, Mike Widom from Carnegie Mellon University and Marek Mihalkovic from Slovak Academy of Sciences are conducting research in our group. A focus of joint research is on complex order and statistical mechanics. The research is funded through the guest research program of FAU.
Welcome to Erlangen!
The German Research Foundation just announced that CRC 1411 will receive funding until 2028.
The long-term vision of CRC1411 is to develop particle systems with controlled size, shape and composition. The innovative approach in CRC1411 is is that these materials are first developed and optimized for specific product properties in computer models. In the second step, the computer then predicts optimal synthesis conditions that lead to particles with these desired properties. This approach reverses typical manufacturing processes and promises fast and resource-efficient access to functional particle-based materials with optimal characteristics.
Michael Engel is among the 2% most cited scientists worldwide in 2022. The study by a team of researchers from Stanford University is based on data extracted from Scopus.
Press release of the university:
More than 200 researchers from FAU are cited particularly often
Carlos Lange Bassani received an EAM Starting Grant. This grant is an encouragement for young researchers to venture into inovative and risky projects, and is a stepping stone towards ERC grant applications. Congratulations!
Nanocrystal (NC) superlattices are a novel way to design functional materials. Nanomaterial chemists thrived in forming NCs with controlled size and shape and assembling them into superstructures. Functionality of these materials relies on precise control of NC habits and superstructure formation, as well as on the electronic coupling between NCs –that is, it is an inherently multiscale process–, but multiscale models did not keep pace with recent advances in the field.
The proposed project upscales from atomic to realistic-sized NCs with 10s-of-millions of atoms via rejection-free kinetic Monte Carlo based on the semi-Gibbs ensemble. Of interest is the role of strain accumulation affected by defects, lattice mismatch, and geometric frustration, thus kinetically entrapping NCs into lower symmetry habits –that is, NC shapes that do not comply with the symmetry of the underlying crystalline structure. Coupling with reactor scales (the environment) to understand mass transfer-limited crystallization is also pivotal to predicting the yield of denser NC populations. A multiscale understanding from atom-to-NC-to-environment will optimize NC synthesis conditions and design strategies for new NC habits.
For the next five months, Prof. Tomoko Mizuguchi from Kyoto Institute of Technology is spending her sabbatical in our group. Tomoko is researching molecular simulations in biophysics, chemical physics and soft matter. Welcome to Erlangen!
The tetrahedral geometry is ubiquitous in natural and synthetic systems. Regular tetrahedra do not tile space, which makes understanding their self-assembly behavior a formidable challenge. In 2009, simulations of hard tetrahedra —that is particles with the shape of a regular tetrahedron, interacting only by excluded volume interactions— discovered a dodecagonal quasicrystal stabilized by entropy alone. But while this quasicrystal forms robustly and reproducibly in simulation, it competes with periodic approximants and cannot be the thermodynamic ground state in the limit of infinite pressure. In this limit, the densest packing will eventually prevail, which is a simple (in comparison) dimer crystal.
Finally, after 14 years, our simulation predictions are confirmed. Yi Wang from the group of Xingchen Ye at Indiana University (USA) experimentally realized multiple phases of tetrahedron colloids where vertex sharpness, surface ligands, and the self-assembly environment play key roles in the formation of the quasicrystal and the dimer crystal. Our colleagues at the Institute of Micro- and Nanostructure Research at FAU resolved the complex three-dimensional structure of the quasicrystal by a combination of electron microscopy, tomography, and synchrotron X-ray scattering. The joint findings demonstrate the predictive power of computer simulations as well as the importance of accurate control over nanocrystal attributes and the assembly method to realize increasingly complex nanopolyhedron supracrystals.
Read about the research here:
Yi Wang, Jun Chen, Ruipeng Li, Alexander Götz, Dominik Drobek, Thomas Przybilla, Sabine Hübner, Philipp Pelz, Lin Yang, Benjamin Apeleo Zubiri, Erdmann Spiecker, Michael Engel, Xingchen Ye
Controlled Self-Assembly of Gold Nanotetrahedra into Quasicrystals and Complex Periodic Supracrystals
Journal of the American Chemical Society 145, 17902 (2023)
Carlos Lange Bassani received the Best Poster Award at the International Conference on Gas Hydrates – ICGH10 (https://icgh10.com/) held in Singapore from 9 to 14 of July, 2023, for the work entitled “A New Approach for Gas Hydrate Slurry Flow based on a Multiscale Model for Multiphase Flow”, in collaboration with Colorado School of Mines/USA, Mines Saint-Etienne/France, and UTFPR/Brazil.
ICGH is the most important conference in the field of gas clathrate hydrates and takes place every 3 years. Carlos Lange Bassani acknowledges the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for the sponsorship of his postdoctoral fellowship and the Emerging Talents Initiative of the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg that allowed the participation in the conference.