Focus session “New self-assembly topologies” at APS March Meeting

Always good to be back in New Orleans … this time a couple of weeks after Mardi Gras. This year’s APS March meeting was an excellent success with the GSOFT focus group more visible than ever, and many great sessions in the GSOFT, DPOLY, DBIO, SPNP and other sections, including our own focus session “New Mesophase Symmetries and Topologies in Self-Assembled Soft Matter“.

“New Mesophase Symmetries and Topologies in Self-Assembled Soft Matter” (session A16 in the program) had some great science in it, with a wonderful invited talk by Frank Bates on Frank-Kaspar phases in copolymers and the like. All up a full session with 13 talks, and about a hundred or so people in attendance.

The talks by Frank Bates and Greg Grason (see abstracts here and here)seem to make it clear that we’ll be yet to see more micellar phases come up, and Marcus Müller’s talk (see talk abstracts and paper) had a whole host of new bicontinuous phases that emerge in copolymers when one directs the self-assembly kinetics through unstable and meta-stable states. Certainly excellent to see Schoen’s F-RD surface realised somewhere!

Thanks to my co-organisers Annela Seddon, Cecile Leal and Mahesh Mahanthappa for putting the session together with me, and thanks to everyone in attendance for making it a fun event, and thanks to Murdoch University for supporting Soft Matter Science.