The Annual NanoSEC meeting will be held May 31, 2006 in Riverbend Research South (the Old Complex Carbohydrate Research Center). It is located on Riverbend Rd.
Directions:
College Station Rd. heading away from campus
Pass the Health Center on your left and the loop on your right
Take a right on Riverbend Rd
Riverbend Research South (The Old CCRC) is located on the right after Riverbend Research Lab and the Center for Applied Isotope Study
Map of UGA Campus
Dr. Michael Geller
Michael Geller, professor of physics and member of UGA’s Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center, is one of five co-principal investigators on a three-year $1.46 million multi-institution grant from the National Science Foundation to pursue the theoretical underpinnings behind some of the newest challenges in science, the laws governing theoretical nanomechanics.
Geller and a team of physicists and engineers from Cal Tech, Brown University, Dartmouth College and Lawrence-Livermore National Laboratory will examine ongoing experimentation using state-of-the-art computation and simulation techniques for solid state, biological and integrated nano-bio systems. UGA is the lead institution on the grant.
As nanotechnology has gained currency as the most promising next frontier in science, experimentation has outstripped the theory needed to properly understand and make efficient use of it. This interdisciplinary grant is intended to make some fundamental inroads in closing that gap.
The team’s strategy will be to develop broadly applicable theoretical methods by examining three paradigmatic mechanics problems: friction and energy dissipation in nano-mechanical systems; new mechanical models for biological materials and machines, including DNA, bacterial flagella and ion channels; and the design and simulation of bio-functionalized devices with applications to chemical and biological sensing. The friction issues uncovered by experimentalists in nano-mechanical systems highlight a recent breakthrough in quantum mechanics, the multi-faceted potential of nanomechanical resonators.
“This is one of the biggest things going on in nanoscience period right now,” says Geller. “It turns out these resonators can act very well to communicate information and actually process and perform quantum computation.”
Applications from this work reach from sensors to quantum computing to devices yet to be imagined. Traditional mechanics approaches have been unable to describe the mechanical properties of many nanoscale systems. This team of mechanical engineers and condensed-matter physicists offers the expertise to mirror the growing evidence that nanomechanics is a multi-scale problem, combining traditional atomistic and continuum methods. The team ventures into bio-physics and can take advantage of, assist and even compete with experimental research in quantum mechanics.
