C J Olson Reichhardt

Ph. D., Physics, University of Michigan, 1998. M. S., Physics, University of Michigan, 1995. B. S., Physics, minor Mathematics University of California, Irvine, 1993 2011 Fellow of the American Physical Society Technical Staff Member Theoretical Division, T-4 Physics of Condensed Matter and Complex Systems T-4 Complex Systems Group 2000-2003 Richard P. Feynman Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow Los Alamos National Laboratory Distinguished Postdoctoral Performance Award 2003 Los Alamos National Laboratory Achievement Award 2004 My research focuses on systems with many degrees of freedom where collective and competing interactions can give rise to highly complex and organized structures and dynamics. Some particular systems that we study include vortex lattices in superconductors, assemblies of granular particles, charge ordering in soft matter materials such as colloids and polymers, charge ordering in hard condensed matter systems such as stripe, bubble, and Wigner crystal phases in quantum Hall systems and cuprate superconductors, elastic interfaces, supercooled liquids and glasses, biological systems and networks of interacting adaptive agents. Despite the difference in these systems in terms of the interactions and spatial scales there are a remarkable number of similar behaviors that arise. A significant portion of my research involves the behaviors of these systems when driven out of equilibrium. My collaborators and I have been working on ways to analyze and characterize these systems, such as identifying distinct types of nonequilibrium phases and transitions between these phases. The understanding of non equilibrium behavior will be paramount for understanding many aspects of biological systems which are inherently systems out of equilibrium with collective interactions. In most of our work we try to explicitly relate the microscopic dynamical behaviors to experimentally measurable bulk quantities. We are currently working with several experimental groups. In addition, we have also been studying various ways to simulate and develop new devices and structured materials with these systems for technological applications. Examples of this include using simulations to show that specific types of novel colloidal crystals can be stabilized in patterned 2D and 3D substrates which can be useful for the creation of materials with specific photonic band gaps. Also we have been considering new types of ratchet devices for separating or mixing different species of particles such as colloids, biomolecules, and polymers. With the increasing push toward the nanoscale new types of electronic and mechanical devices may be soon realizable. We have been exploring alternate electronic and mechanical devices on the nanoscale such as logic circuits using superconducting vortices in nano-dot arrays.