Günter Reiter (Internal Senior Fellow, School of Softmatter Research): "Order emerging from disorder."

Crystallization and self-assembly are certainly some of the most fascinating processes in Nature. Since ancient times questions have been asked about how a multitude of patterns can emerge in various systems, and all that without human intervention.

Spontaneous and reversible organization processes driven by local interactions among the components themselves transform a disordered system of pre-existing components into regular structures. The basic building blocks are not only atoms and molecules, but can span a wide range of nano- and mesoscopic objects.

I will discuss general rules about growth and evolution of structure. The goal of our ongoing research is to understand the physics of how molecules or objects put themselves together.