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, superballs, and polyhdedra), 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

• November 16, 2009: Growing Heterogeneous Tumors in Silico is published in Physical Review E.
• October 30, 2009: Method for Obtaining Upper Bounds on Photonic Band Gaps is published in Physical Review B.
• October 20, 2009: A Superior Descriptor of Random Textures and Its Predictive Capacity is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
• October 6, 2009: Complete Band Gaps in Two-Dimensional Photonic Quasicrystals is published in Physical Review B.
• October 5, 2009: Dense Packings of Polyhedra: Platonic and Archimedean Solids is published in Physical Review E. This paper is follow-up of the recent Nature paper.
• September 4, 2009: Interactions Leading to Disordered Ground States and Unusual Low-Temperature Behavior is published in Physical Review E.
• August 13, 2009: Dense Packings of the Platonic and Archimedean Solids published in Nature. Additional information about this work and links to other descriptions and podcasts can be found here.
• July 31, 2009: Novel Low Temperature Behavior in Classical Many Particle Systems is published in Physical Review Letters.
• 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.