When a metal is grown onto a substrate of itself (homoepitaxy), the growth front is typically smooth, or at most is roughened by the formation of shallow hills (called surface mounds). The underlying reason for the roughening has been recognized to be of kinetic nature: Atoms landed on an upper terrace do not have enough time to overcome the "road blocks" provided by the steps and fill all the valleys (known as the Villian instability).
A new journal dedicated to the field of Molecular and Cellular Biomechanics has been formed for about a year. Many members in this community (such as Ning Wang, Cheng Zhu, Phil LeDuc) are on the board of editors. You may want to check it out....
Last updated on 19 March 2008
Related post: Some dates of iMechanica
These used to be hosted at Northwestern, but the files were taken down some time ago. The original 1d and 2d Matlab routines for the element-free Galerkin method are now located at
http://www.duke.edu/~jdolbow/EFG/programs.html
These routines are described in detail in the paper
J. Dolbow and T. Belytschko (1998), "An Introduction to Programming the Meshless Element Free Galerkin Method," Archives of Computational Methods in Engineering, vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 207--242.
Abstract submission is now open for the 2007 ASME Summer Bioengineering Conference, 20-24 June, 2007 in Keystone, Colorado. Full details can be found on the conference website. Please note that there is a vibrant and competitive student paper competition for different
We recently reported the mass sensing by using resonating microcantilevers. The characterization of mass-sensing and its related sensitivity was suggested on the basis of elasticity theory.
Recently, I reported the model reduction method for large proteins for understanding large protein dynamics based on low-frequency normal modes. This work was pubslihed at Journal of Computational Chemistry (click here).
Coarse-Graining of protein structures for the normal mode studies
Abstracts
Lambert Ben Freund (LBF) was born on November 23, 1942, in Johnsburg, Illinois, a tiny rural community of a few hundred people in the northeast corner of the state. This part of the Midwest was opened to European settlement by the Black Hawk War of the 1830s. A small delegation of his ancestors arrived in the area in 1841. The enthusiastic letters they wrote to relatives waiting in Bavaria and the Rhineland resulted in rapid settlement of the area by immigrant families in the mid-1800s.
When a metal system shrinks its dimension(s), the conduction electrons inside the metal feel the squeezing, and are forced into (discrete) quantum states. Such confined motion of the conduction electrons may influence the global or local stability of the low dimensional systems, and in the case of a thin film on a foreign substrate this "quantum energy" of electronic origin can easily overwhelm the strain effects in definging the film stability, thereby severely influencing the preferred growth mode (see, e.g., Suo and Zhang, Phys. Rev. B 58, 5116 (1998)).
