Surveying the Free Energy Landscapes of Soft Matter Systems

: In many soft matter systems the stability of minimum free energy configurations and the transition pathways from one state to another play a central role. Liquid crystal devices often exploit the existence of two or more (meta-)stable states and are of great technological interests because power is only needed when the devices switch states. A major obstacle in many applications of superhydrophobic surfaces is the lack of stability of the so-called suspended states, where gas cushions are trapped in between the surface corrugations. Shape transformations of lipid bilayers play an important role in cellular transport as well as how cells react to external stimuli. In these examples and many others, detailed information on the free energy landscapes of the systems is very desirable, including the possible minimum energy configurations, as well as the transition states, energy barriers, and transition pathways between different local minima. The aim of this project is thus to develop a set of numerical techniques, and correspondingly software, to survey free energy landscapes of continuum soft matter systems. Potential applications include, but are not limited to, problems in wetting phenomena, liquid crystals and membranes. In fact, the developed techniques will be versatile, allowing different physical models and complex boundary conditions to be implemented and calculated with relative ease.