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 four other departments /programs: Physics, Applied and Computational Mathematics, Chemical Engineering, 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 disordered and ordered particle packings in low dimensions (including M&Ms, ellipsoids, and superballs), sphere packings in high dimensions, optimal multifunctional material design, self-assembly theory, and unusual ground states. We are also engaged in a research program to model tumor growth.

Recent News From the Group

• July 1, 2009: Mean Survival Times of Absorbing Triply Periodic Minimal Surfaces is published in Physcial Review E.
• May, 2009: Prof. Torquato has been elected to the inaugural group of fellows for the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). The announcement can be found here.
• May 4, 2009: Jana Gevertz successfully defends her thesis! Congratulations Dr. Gevertz and good luck at The College of New Jersey!
• April, 2009: Optimal Packings of Superballs appears in Physical Review E. The two-dimensional analog was previously published in PRL.
• April, 2009: Statistical Properties of Determinental Point Processes in High-Euclidean Spaces is published in Physical Review E.
• March 27, 2009: "Dense Sphere Packing from Optimized Correlation Functions" is published in Physical Review E.
• March 16, 2009: Prof. Torquato is awarded the 2009 APS David Adler Lectureship Award in the Field of Material Physics for "his highly original and deep studies of n-point correlation functions in heterogeneous materials and his outstanding communications of these results through publication and public presentation." More information is available at the APS website. Congratulations Prof. Torquato!
• March, 2009: Prof. Torquato's review on Inverse Optimization Techniques for Targeted Self-Assembly is published in Soft Matter.
• February 16, 2009: Prof. Torquato gives the PACM Colloquium talk on "Unusual Classical Ground States of Matter." The presentation slides are available online.
• December 1, 2008: Point Processes in Arbitrary Dimension from Fermionic Gases, Random Matrix Theory, and Number Theory is published in the Journal of Statistic Mechanics: Theory and Experiment.
• November, 2008: Two new papers from our reserach program in tumor growth modeling are published. A Novel Three-Phase Model of Brain Tissue Microstructure and Simulating Tumor Growth in Confined Heterogeneous Environments.