CHEM-DiCE in Nonequilibrium Colloids
Cf. Research Interests:

In plain words: For most of us, it's a simple matter to walk across a floor from one end to another. That is, if the room is completely empty. If instead, the room is full of people or other obstacles, then our motion may be more like that of a directed Brownian particle. It's directed because we are intent on going to a particular place. It's Brownian because we are being pushed and slowed down by the random positions of all the other people. Amazingly, the motion of a molecule in a liquid can often be well described as being that of a directed Brownian particle! But what if the floor starts to move (because of an earthquake, say) or the other people start to move in ways that are are themselves directed? The analogy to the molecular system is now extended to refer to the solvent being out of equilibrium. Our group is developing techniques to characterize such far-from-equilibrium chemical motions.

Dynamics in Swelling/Contracting Colloids and Rotating Mesogens

Detailed summary in construction

Relevant references are:

  • E. Hershkovitz and R. Hernandez; "Chemical reaction dynamics within anisotropic solvents in time-dependent fields," J. Chem. Phys. 122, 014509 (2005). (cond-mat/0501434, doi:10.1063/1.1829252)
  • M. Vogt and R. Hernandez; "An idealized model for nonequilibrium dynamics in molecular systems," J. Chem. Phys. 123, 144109 (2005). (cond-mat/0501328, doi:10.1063/1.2052594)
  • A. V. Popov, J. Melvin, and R. Hernandez; "Dynamics of swelling/contracting hard spheres surmised by an irreversible Langevin equation," J. Phys. Chem. A 110, 1635-1644 (2006). (In the William L. Hase Festschrift issue.) (doi:10.1021/jp054241a)