Welcome to the Complex Materials Theory Group!

Our research group is based at Princeton University in the Department of Chemistry, the Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials, and the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science. We also have affiliations with three other departments /programs: Physics, Applied and Computational Mathematics, and Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering. We are generally interested in understanding the relationship between the macroscopic behavior of complex materials and their microstructures. Complex materials under study include heterogeneous materials (e.g., composites and porous media), colloids, liquids, glasses and crystals. This includes our current work on,

Recent News From the Group

• April 19th, 2012: Adam Hopkins was awarded the Ray Grimm Memorial Prize in Computational Physics for outstanding research achievements, academic merit, and creativity.
• March 22nd, 2012: Our paper A Packing of Truncated Tetrahedra That Nearly Fills All of Space and its Melting Properties published in Journal of Chemical Physics has been selected in the 2011 Editor's Choice as one of the "most innovative and influential'' papers.
• March 21st, 2012: Diversity of dynamics and morphologies of invasive solid tumors is published in AIP Advances.
• March 7th, 2012: Hydration and percolation at the setting point is published in Cement and Concrete Research.
• February 28nd, 2012: Invited talk by Professor Torquato entitled "Packing Nonspherical Particles: All Shapes Are Not Created Equal" given at the March American Physical Society Meeting in Boston. See also the APS link for the talk abstract and slides.
• February 22nd, 2012: Densest binary sphere packings is published in Physical Review E.
• February 22nd, 2012: Density of States for a Specified Correlation Function and the Energy Landscape is published in Physical Review Letters.
• February 8th, 2012: Effect of dimensionality on the continuum percolation of overlapping hyperspheres and hypercubes is published in Journal of Chemical Physics.
• December 22nd, 2011: Emergent Behaviors From a Cellular Automaton Model for Invasive Tumor Growth in Heterogeneous Microenvironments is published in PLoS Computational Biology.
• December 16th, 2011: Prof. Torquato has been awarded the Simons Fellowship in Theoretical Physics; see also the Physics department announcement of the award.
• December 2nd, 2011: Prof. Torquato office has moved to 160 Frick Lab, while the Torquato group now sits in 152 Frick Lab.
• November 23rd, 2011: Rigidity of Spherical Codes is published in Geometry and Topology.
• November 18th, 2011: Spatial Organization and Correlations of Cell Nuclei in Brain Tumors is published in PLoS ONE.
• November 3rd, 2011: Improved reconstructions of random media using dilation and erosion processes is published in Physical Review E.
• October 31st, 2011: Maximally Random Jammed Packings of Platonic Solids: Hyperuniform Long-Range Correlations and Isostaticity is published in Physical Review E.
• October 17th, 2011: A Packing of Truncated Tetrahedra That Nearly Fills All of Space and its Melting Properties is published in Journal of Chemical Physics.
• October 17th, 2011: High-Dimensional Generalizations of the Kagome and Diamond Crystals and the Decorrelation Principle for Periodic Sphere Packings is published in Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment.
• September 13th, 2011: Phase Diagram and Structural Diversity of the Densest Binary Sphere Packings is published in Physical Review Letters.
• August 3rd, 2011: Inherent Structures for a Soft Long-Range Interaction in Two-Dimensional Many-Particle Systems is published in Journal of Chemical Physics.
• June 20th, 2011: A New Family of Tilings of Three-Dimensional Euclidean Space by Tetrahedra and Octahedra is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. See also one of the top stories on this work at the Princeton University Homepage.
• May 31st, 2011: Hyperuniformity, quasi-long-range correlations, and void-space constraints in maximally random jammed particle packings. II. Anisotropy in particle shape is published in Physical Review E.
• May 31st, 2011: Hyperuniformity, quasi-long-range correlations, and void-space constraints in maximally random jammed particle packings. I. Polydisperse spheres is published in Physical Review E.
• May 31st, 2011: Anomalous local coordination, density fluctuations, and void statistics in disordered hyperuniform many-particle ground states is published in Physical Review E.
• May 10, 2011: Congratulations to Adam Hopkins for earning a University honorific fellowship for the 2011-2012 academic year!
• April 29th, 2011: Hyperuniform Long-Range Correlations are a Signature of Disordered Jammed Hard-Particle Packings is published in Physical Review Letters.
• April 27th, 2011: Unusual Ground States via Monotonic Convex Pair Potentials is published in The Journal of Chemical Physics.
• April 6th, 2011: Duality Relations for the Classical Ground States of Soft-Matter Systems is published in Soft Matter.
• April 4th, 2011: Congratulations to Robert Batten for receiving the 2011 Ray Grimm Prize in Computational Physics!
• March 10, 2011: Optimized monotonic convex pair potentials stabilize low-coordinated crystals is published in Soft Matter.
• February 8, 2011: Prof. Torquato's paper Torward an Ising Model of Cancer and Beyond is published in Physical Biology.
• February 2, 2011: Densest Local Packing Diversity II. Application to Three Dimensions is published in Physical Review E.
• January 22, 2011: New Bounds on the Sedimentation Velocity for Hard, Charged, and Adhesive Hard Sphere Colloids is published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics.
• January 11, 2011: Nonuniversality of Density and Disorder of Jammed Sphere Packings is published in the Journal of Applied Physics.