Uzi Landman

October 4-8, 2010, Freiburg Germany

Prof. Uzi Landman

School of Physics
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta GA 30332-0430

Phone 404 894 3368
Fax 404 894 7747
uzi.landman(at)physics.gatech.edu
www.physics.gatech.edu/people/faculty/ulandman.html

Molecular Organization, Dynamics and Dissipation in Nanojunctions, Nanofluids and Membranes

Abstract

The arrangements of molecules in thin films confined in a gap between solid boundaries, layering transitions, solvation forces versus gap width, and segregation effects in mixtures of long and short molecules, as well as straight chain and branched alkane films, will be discussed. The effects of surface morphology, that is smooth versus rough confining surfaces, on the structure, dynamics, diffusional characteristics, and tribological properties of the confined films, with and without shearing motion, will be highlighted. In the second part of the lecture we discuss structural, dynamical, and rheological properties of water films of variable thickness confined between a solid tip and a lipid bilayer membrane (DPPC), as well as force vs. distance curves in this system. Finally, we describe trans-membrane transport processes investigated with large-scale molecular dynamics simulations of immersed capillary nanojet injection of a liquid through a lipid bilayer membrane, illustrating membrane puncture and subsequent self healing processes.

Brief Bio

Uzi Landman was born and raised in Israel where he received his education. He obtained a B.Sc degree from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, a M.Sc. from the Weizmann Institute of Science and a D.Sc. from the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion). Since 1970 he worked at UC Santa Barbara, the University of Illinois at Urbana, the Xerox research laboratories at Webster NY, and the University of Rochester NY. In 1977 he joined the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, where he is currently a Regents’ and Institute Professor holding the Callaway Chair and serving as the director of a Center for Computational Materials Science. His main areas of scientific interest are in condensed matter physics, materials science, clusters, quantum dots, nanocatalysis, microscopic hydrodynamics and nanotribology, with an emphasis on the development and use of computational methodologies. Landman published close to 400 articles in these areas. He served as Associate Dean for Research of the College of Science at Georgia Tech and founded the Journal of Computational Materials Science. He received a number of awards, including the APS Jesse Beams outstanding research award in 1999, the 2000 Feynman Prize in Nanothechnology, the 2002  American Materials Research Society medal, the  2005 American Physical Society Rahman  Computational Physics prize, and a Humboldt award in 2008.