Dr. Hannah Jonas has successfully defended her dissertation titled Colloidal patchy particle architectures: Simulations of accurate models in and out of equilibrium. She was promoted by Prof. Peter Bolhuis from HIMS and Prof. Peter Schall from IoP. In her thesis, she used patchy colloidal particles interacting via critical Casimir interactions as mesoscopic analogues for molecular, supramolecular and bio-inspired structures. Via simulations, Hannah provided microscopic insight into the behavior of these patchy particles both in and out of equilibrium. She developed an accurate patchy particle potential in a hybrid bottom-up/top-down coarse-graining approach, and benchmarked simulation results against experimental measurements. As an alternative to explicit simulations, she explored Wertheim’s theory to predict the thermodynamic equilibrium of these systems, which she later adapted to extremely confined systems under the effect of gravity. Finally, she investigated the effect of activity on the patchy particle structures such as dimers, decamers, rings and networks, finding that the activity can enhance as well as reduce the stability of architectures, deform the intact structures, alter the mechanisms of fragmentation, and increase bond formation.
