Related Research Articles
In physics, chemistry, and other related fields like biology, a phase transition is the physical process of transition between one state of a medium and another. Commonly the term is used to refer to changes among the basic states of matter: solid, liquid, and gas, and in rare cases, plasma. A phase of a thermodynamic system and the states of matter have uniform physical properties. During a phase transition of a given medium, certain properties of the medium change as a result of the change of external conditions, such as temperature or pressure. This can be a discontinuous change; for example, a liquid may become gas upon heating to its boiling point, resulting in an abrupt change in volume. The identification of the external conditions at which a transformation occurs defines the phase transition point.
The fluctuation theorem (FT), which originated from statistical mechanics, deals with the relative probability that the entropy of a system which is currently away from thermodynamic equilibrium will increase or decrease over a given amount of time. While the second law of thermodynamics predicts that the entropy of an isolated system should tend to increase until it reaches equilibrium, it became apparent after the discovery of statistical mechanics that the second law is only a statistical one, suggesting that there should always be some nonzero probability that the entropy of an isolated system might spontaneously decrease; the fluctuation theorem precisely quantifies this probability.
Daan Frenkel is a Dutch computational physicist in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge.
David W. Snoke is a Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Pittsburgh and Co-Director of the Pittsburgh Quantum Institute. In 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society "for his pioneering work on the experimental and theoretical understanding of dynamical optical processes in semiconductor systems." In 2004 he co-wrote a controversial paper with prominent intelligent design proponent Michael Behe. In 2007, his research group was the first to report Bose-Einstein condensation of polaritons in a trap. David Snoke and theoretical physicist Jonathan Keeling recently published an article announcing a new era for polariton condensates saying that polaritons are arguably the "...best hope for harnessing the strange effects of quantum condensation and superfluidity in everyday applications."
Peter Schwerdtfeger is a German scientist. He holds a chair in theoretical chemistry at Massey University in Auckland, New Zealand, serves as director of the Centre for Theoretical Chemistry and Physics, is the head of the New Zealand Institute for Advanced Study, and is a former president of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
Erich Sackmann was a German experimental physicist and a pioneer of biophysics in Europe.
Xiaowei Zhuang is a Chinese-American biophysicist who is the David B. Arnold Jr. Professor of Science, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, and Professor of Physics at Harvard University, and an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She is best known for her work in the development of Stochastic Optical Reconstruction Microscopy (STORM), a super-resolution fluorescence microscopy method, and the discoveries of novel cellular structures using STORM. She received a 2019 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for developing super-resolution imaging techniques that get past the diffraction limits of traditional light microscopes, allowing scientists to visualize small structures within living cells. She was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019 and was awarded a Vilcek Foundation Prize in Biomedical Science in 2020.
In biophysics and related fields, reduced dimension forms (RDFs) are unique on-off mechanisms for random walks that generate two-state trajectories (see Fig. 1 for an example of a RDF and Fig. 2 for an example of a two-state trajectory). It has been shown that RDFs solve two-state trajectories, since only one RDF can be constructed from the data, where this property does not hold for on-off kinetic schemes, where many kinetic schemes can be constructed from a particular two-state trajectory (even from an ideal on-off trajectory). Two-state time trajectories are very common in measurements in chemistry, physics, and the biophysics of individual molecules (e.g. measurements of protein dynamics and DNA and RNA dynamics, activity of ion channels, enzyme activity, quantum dots ), thus making RDFs an important tool in the analysis of data in these fields.
Martin Gruebele is a German-born American physical chemist and biophysicist who is currently emeritus James R. Eiszner Chair in Chemistry, Professor of Physics, Professor of Biophysics and Computational Biology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Peter Guy Wolynes is an American theoretical chemist and physicist. Since 2011 he has been a Bullard-Welch Foundation Professor of Science and professor of chemistry at Rice University. He is widely recognized for his significant contributions to the theories of protein folding, glasses, and gene networks. Previously he was James R. Eiszner Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Francis H.C. Crick Chair of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego.
Robert Tycko is an American biophysicist whose research primarily involves solid state NMR, including the development of new methods and applications to various areas of physics, chemistry, and biology. He is a member of the Laboratory of Chemical Physics in the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, USA. He was formerly a member of the Physical Chemistry Research and Materials Chemistry Research departments of AT&T Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey. His work has contributed to our understanding of geometric phases in spectroscopy, physical properties of fullerenes, skyrmions in 2D electron systems, protein folding, and amyloid fibrils associated with Alzheimer’s disease and prions.
Robert Walter Zwanzig was an American theoretical physicist and chemist who made important contributions to the statistical mechanics of irreversible processes, protein folding, and the theory of liquids and gases.
Biman Bagchi is an Indian scientist currently serving as a SERB-DST National Science Chair Professor and Honorary Professor at the Solid State and Structural Chemistry Unit of the Indian Institute of Science. He is a theoretical physical chemist and biophysicist known for his research in the area of statistical mechanics; particularly in the study of phase transition and nucleation, solvation dynamics, mode-coupling theory of electrolyte transport, dynamics of biological macromolecules, protein folding, enzyme kinetics, supercooled liquids and protein hydration layer. He is an elected fellow of the Indian National Science Academy, the Indian Academy of Sciences, The World Academy of Sciences and an International honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Along with several scientific articles, he has authored three books, (i) Molecular Relaxation in Liquids, (ii) Water in Biological and Chemical Processes: From Structure and Dynamics to Function, and (iii) Statistical Mechanics for Chemistry and Materials Science.
William Allen Eaton is a biophysical chemist who is a NIH Distinguished Investigator, Chief of the Section on Biophysical Chemistry, and Chief of the Laboratory of Chemical Physics at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, one of the 20 Institutes of the United States National Institutes of Health.
Sarah L. Keller is an American biophysicist, studying problems at the intersection between biology and chemistry. She investigates self-assembling soft matter systems. Her current main research focus is understanding how simple lipid mixtures within bilayer membranes give rise to membrane's complex phase behavior.
Laura B. Eisenstein (1942–1985) was a professor in the physics department at the University of Illinois until her early death. Eisenstein was known for her contributions to the understanding of light-energy transduction mechanisms in biological molecules and their higher order assemblies. She was an experimentalist and spectroscopist who was particularly well known for her contributions applying the techniques of x-ray absorption spectroscopy and time-resolved resonance Raman spectroscopy to the study of biomolecules. These studies indicated that phenomena such as quantum-mechanical tunnelling can be successfully investigated even in soft-matter systems like proteins.
Nikolay V. Dokholyan is an American biophysicist, academic and researcher. He is a G. Thomas Passananti Professor and Vice Chair for Research at Penn State College of Medicine.
Jens Horst Gundlach is a German physicist.
Dov I. Levine is an American-Israeli physicist, known for his research on quasicrystals, soft condensed matter physics, and statistical mechanics out of equilibrium.
Robert Everett Ecke is an American experimental physicist who is a laboratory fellow and director emeritus of the Center for Nonlinear Studies (CNLS) at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Affiliate Professor of Physics at the University of Washington. His research has included chaotic nonlinear dynamics, pattern formation, rotating Rayleigh-Bénard convection, two-dimensional turbulence, granular materials, and stratified flows. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), was chair of the APS Topical Group on Statistical and Nonlinear Physics, served in numerous roles in the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics, and was the Secretary of the Physics Section of the AAAS.
References
- ↑ Peter G Wolynes; Jose N Onuchic; Dave Thirumalai (17 March 1995). "Navigating the folding routes". Science. 267 (5204): 1619–1620. Bibcode:1995Sci...267.1619W. doi:10.1126/science.7886447. PMID 7886447. S2CID 5199444.
- ↑ D Thirumalai; Changbong Hyeon (11 March 2005). "RNA and protein folding: common themes and variations". Biochemistry. 44 (13): 4957–4970. doi:10.1021/bi047314+. PMID 15794634.
- ↑ D Thirumalai; DK Klimov; RI Dima (11 April 2003). "Emerging ideas on the molecular basis of protein and peptide aggregation". Current Opinion in Structural Biology. 13 (2): 146–159. doi:10.1016/S0959-440X(03)00032-0. PMID 12727507.
- ↑ Theodore R Kirkpatrick; Devarajan Thirumalai; Peter G Wolynes (1 July 1989). "Scaling concepts for the dynamics of viscous liquids near an ideal glassy state". Physical Review A. 40 (2): 1045–1054. Bibcode:1989PhRvA..40.1045K. doi:10.1103/PhysRevA.40.1045. PMID 9902230.
- ↑ T. R. Kirkpatrick; D. Thirumalai (March 2015). "Colloquium: Random first order transition theory concepts in biology and physics". Reviews of Modern Physics. 87 (1): 183–209. Bibcode:2015RvMP...87..183K. doi: 10.1103/RevModPhys.87.183 . S2CID 123937625.
- ↑ Mauro L Mugnai; Changbong Hyeon; Michael Hinczewski; D Thirumalai (7 April 2020). "Theoretical perspectives on biological machines". Reviews of Modern Physics. 92 (2): 025001. arXiv: 1908.11323 . Bibcode:2020RvMP...92b5001M. doi:10.1103/RevModPhys.92.025001. S2CID 201671124.
- ↑ Upayan Baul; Debayan Chakraborty; Mauro L Mugnai; John E Straub; Dave Thirumalai (26 March 2019). "Sequence effects on size, shape, and structural heterogeneity in intrinsically disordered proteins". The Journal of Physical Chemistry B. 123 (16): 3462-3474. doi:10.1021/acs.jpcb.9b02575. PMC 6920032 . PMID 30913885.
- ↑ Guang Shi; Lei Liu; Changbong Hyeon; Dave Thirumalai (2018). "Interphase human chromosome exhibits out of equilibrium glassy dynamics". Nature Communications. 9 (1): 3161. Bibcode:2018NatCo...9.3161S. doi:10.1038/s41467-018-05606-6. PMC 6082855 . PMID 30089831.
- ↑ Abdul N Malmi-Kakkada; Xin Li; Himadri S Samanta; Sumit Sinha; Dave Thirumalai (27 April 2018). "Cell growth rate dictates the onset of glass to fluidlike transition and long time superdiffusion in an evolving cell colony". Physical Review X. 8 (2): 021025. arXiv: 1708.03397 . Bibcode:2018PhRvX...8b1025M. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevX.8.021025 .
- ↑ "Dave Thirumalai to Chair Department of Chemistry".
- ↑ "2015 APS Fellow Archive".
- ↑ "2016 Physical Chemistry Division Awards".
- ↑ "Dave Thirumalai Receives 2018 Oesper Award".
- ↑ "Dave Thirumalai Awarded Langmuir Prize in Chemical Physics".
- ↑ "Dave Thirumalai Receives the Hans Neurath Award".
- ↑ "Devarajan Thirumalai to Receive Biophysical Society's 2025 Founders Award".
- ↑ "Devarajan Thirumalai Receives Max Delbrück Prize in Biological Physics".
   | This article about an American physicist is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |