Tales of Emerging Complexity: from Self-Assembly to
Self-Replication
Alexei Tkachenko, Brookhaven National Laboratory
Abstract:
Self-assembly is a key phenomenon in living matter,
and at the same time, a booming field of modern
material science and engineering. In my talk I will review
emerging trends and ideas in this field, and give theorist's
perspective on its conceptual challenges. I will discuss the
strategy of programmable self-assembly that uses
molecular recognition properties of DNA to build nano- and
micro-scale building blocks with designed pairwise
interactions. This approach opens an entirely new
class of theoretical problems in statistical physics.
Instead of studying phenomenology of a large system of
particles with given properties, we must solve the
inverse problem: finding the interactions that would result
in a self-assembly of a desired macroscopic or mesoscopic
morphology. I will start with a discussion of self-assembly in a
very simple binary system of spherical particles, and
gradually move towards a greater complexity of both the building
blocks and the resulting structures. Eventually, from the problem
of programmable self assembly we will shift to a pursue of the
simplest system capable of self-replication and Darwinian
Evolution.
" This research used resources of the Center for
Functional Nanomaterials, which is a U.S. DOE Office of Science
Facility, at Brookhaven National Laboratory under Contract No.
DE-SC0012704"