George C. Schatz, Northwestern University.
October 12, 2021. 3:35 – 4:50 pm.
A Joint Virtual Seminar with IIT’s Chemistry Colloquium on Zoom.
Molecular self-assembly involves the use of hydrogen bonds and other noncovalent interactions between molecules to create supramolecular structures. A goal of theory is to be able to predict and understand what structures will arise for any given set of conditions, and how the self-assembly can be directed so as to produce useful functional structures. In this talk I will describe recent studies in my group in collaboration with the Stupp and Mirkin groups at Northwestern, and with others, with the goal of making nanostructured materials with broad applications.
One area of interest concerns studies of peptide amphiphile self-assembly to produce cylindrical micelles and ultimately fiber materials that can be used for applications in biomedicine and for making materials that can be photoactivated for robotic functions. Here we have developed all-atom and coarse-grained models, and specialized molecular dynamics methods, that are capable of describing assembly into fibers, leading to an understanding of biological functions and photoactivation.
In a second direction we are interested in the coupling of self-assembly chemistry involving DNA attached to silver and gold nanoparticles to create a new generation of bottom-up nanomaterials of interest for sensing and optical devices. Here we show both coarse-grained and all-atom approaches to the assembly, and how these can be used to understand the formation of plasmonic array structures, including recent studies aimed at understanding programmability of dynamic optical properties, and also in mechanical actuation.