UMass Amherst
physicists, with others, provide a new software tool and
database to help
materials designers with the difficult calculations needed
to predict the
magnitude of van der Waals interactions between anisotropic or
directionally
dependent bodies such as those illustrated, with long-range torques.
Though small,
these forces are dominant on the nanoscale. Courtesy of UMass Amherst
UMass Amherst physicists offer new open source calculations
for molecular interactions
(September 22, 2015) As
electronic, medical and molecular-level biological devices grow smaller and
smaller, approaching the nanometer scale, the chemical engineers and materials
scientists devising them often struggle to predict the magnitude of molecular
interactions on that scale and whether new combinations of materials will
assemble and function as designed.
This is because the physics of interactions at these scales
is difficult, say physicists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who
with colleagues elsewhere this week unveil a project known as Gecko Hamaker, a
new computational and modeling software tool plus an open science database to
aid those who design nano-scale materials.
In the cover story in today’s issue of Langmuir, Adrian Parsegian,
Gluckstern Chair in physics, physics doctoral student Jaime Hopkins and adjunct
professor Rudolf Podgornik on the UMass Amherst team report calculations of van
der Waals interactions between DNA, carbon nanotubes, proteins and various
inorganic materials, with colleagues at Case Western Reserve University and the
University of Missouri who make up the Gecko-Hamaker project team.