Hauptseminar Soft Matter SS 2019
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Participants need to register through CAMPUS. |
There will be an organizational meeting that will be mandatory to all participants to discuss topics and style and other requirements. |
Overview
- Type
- Seminar (Student-prepared talks, followed by discussion)
- Date and Time
- to be determined
- Location
- Institut für Computerphysik, room 01.079
- Credit Points
- 2 SWS = 6 ECTS for M.Sc. Physik
- 3 ECTS for M.Sc. PHYSICS
- Teachers
- Prof. Dr. Siegfried Dietrich (MPI-IS/ITP4)
- Prof. Dr. Christian Holm (ICP)
- Organizer
- Michael Kuron (ICP)
- Modules
- Hauptseminar for M.Sc. Physik
- Seminar in Physics for M.Sc. PHYSICS
- Advanced Seminar in Physics for M.Sc. PHYSICS
- Language
- English
- Description
- Soft matter is the field of physics that concerns itself with systems that are deformable by energies on the scale of thermal fluctuations. This includes liquids, polymers, colloids, and much of biological physics. More recently, the field of active matter has emerged, which studies the behavior of microswimmers and other self-propelled particles, including bacteria. While quantum phenomena are typically negligible at the relevant length scales (~1µm), Brownian motion is important, but hydrodynamics and electrostatics play a role too. The interplay of these effects can lead to complex effects such as clustering or phase separation. In this seminar, we aim to provide an overview of the field, covering topics from hydrodynamics on small length scales, individual polymers and colloids and their dynamics all the way to the collective behavior of microswimmers and the interaction with their environment. The seminar will theoretical descriptions and numerical modeling and perhaps even include some experimental aspects. In this way, we aim to cover analytical models that capture the essentials of the most important soft matter systems and state-of-the-art numerical methods that can solve the full physical problems.
- Requirements
- We expect the participants to have fundamental knowledge in classical and statistical mechanics, thermodynamics, electrodynamics, and partial differential equations.
Schedule, speakers and resources
Will be announced soon. For possible topics, see previous years:
- Soft Matter SS 2012
- Soft Matter WS 2013
- Soft Matter SS 2014
- Soft Matter WS 2014
- Active Matter SS 2017
Getting the credit points
To get the credit points for the seminar, the following criteria should be met:
- All participants must:
- Make the first appointment with their tutor 2 months (a minimum of 8 weeks) before giving their talk
- Have taken a look at the literature provided on the website before this first meeting. This is necessary so that the participant and tutor can make a preliminary decision about the breadth and depth to cover of the topic.
- Hand in a draft of their presentation slides 1 month before giving their talk
- Give a trial talk 2 weeks in advance of their public talk and hand in their final draft of the handout
- Hand in the final version of their handout 1 week in advance
- Give their talk at the arranged time
- Be present at all talks
- Take part in the discussions following the talks
- Give a five-minute summary of the previous week's talk on approximately one occasion (see below)
- The handout:
- Consists of 8 to 10 A4 pages (incl. pictures; 11 pt font, single-spaced text)
- Describes the contents of the talk, written out in full
- Is written for the other participants
- Is written in English
- Must correctly and in a standard scientific style cite all sources used. Any pictures used must have a citation in the caption.
- The talk:
- Consists of material pertaining to the topic
- Has a length of 45 minutes
- Is prepared with a slide deck in electronic form
- Is held in English
- Must cite the author underneath any picture used. Text content should not have citations, but all sources must be listed in the handout.
- The five-minute summary:
- Every week, one student is randomly designated to open the next week's session.
- In the following week, that student will have five minutes to give a brief summary of the previous talk.
- For this, he/she may reuse up to two slides from the talk they are summarizing or they may create one slide on their own.
- The use of slides is not mandatory and the format of the summary is completely up to the student.
- If slides are used, they must be loaded onto the main speaker's laptop before the session starts.
- The summarizer is also the chair of the session. Therefore, at the end of their summary, the chair will introduce the main speaker of the session, giving the speaker's name and topic and (if applicable) saying a sentence or two about how the talk connects to previous talks. Furthermore, it is the chair's job to manage the questions at the end by calling the people who raise their hands and by ensuring that the questions stay on topic.
- Participants are graded according to:
- The quality of the trial talk and final draft of the hand out (50%)
- The quality of the final presentation (25%)
- The level of participation in the discussion and the quality of their five-minute summary (25%)