Lehigh REU research: a Brief summary

Below you'll find the 'abstract' we'll be sending to the NSF summarizing my summer work. I did some other stuff besides what's mentioned, and later I'll give more details, but for now I just want to put something up before I leave tomorrow.

Encapsulation by Janus Particles

Genevieve Brett, Skidmore College

Lehigh University Summer REU 2011

Advisor: Jim Gunton

Collaborators: Ya Liu, Wei Li

Abstract:

Janus particles have dissimilar semi-surfaces, e.g. hydrophobic and hydrophilic, respectively.   One class, colloidal Janus spheres, has been shown in experiments and simulations to exhibit self-assembly into micelles and vesicles.  Another class of Janus particles is that of ellipsoids, in which one can vary the aspect ratio to form oblate or prolate spheroids, for example.  These also have been shown to self-assemble into aggregates whose morphology depends on the aspect ratio.  Our current work investigated the possibility of encapsulating spherical particles by Janus ellipsoids, as a function of the density and aspect ratio of the ellipsoids.  Our model assumes that the sphere-sphere interaction is hard-core repulsion, whereas the ellipsoid-ellipsoid and ellipsoid-sphere interaction is taken to be hard core repulsion plus a square well attractive interaction.  By using standard Monte Carlo simulation, we have found a maximum efficiency of encapsulation of 44.4% for an ellipsoid number density of 0.04 and aspect ratio of 0.6.   This method of encapsulation is of potential value in both the pharmaceutical and materials science community.

What this doesn't say is that I had a great time. All the students in the program were very friendly and surprisingly outgoing for a bunch of physicists (/engineers/chemists/astronomers...). The faculty and grad students and postdocs I got to know were also lovely. Our living situation was also nice, though we often ran out of room in the fridge. Regardless, I am ready to go home for a few weeks to rest and gear up for the semester. 

Oh, one more thing- a draft of a poster for a conference this spring.