Prof. Claudio Zannoni: Predictive Simulations of Liquid Crystals. Where are we now?

Predictive Simulations of Liquid Crystals

Prof. Claudio Zannoni, University of Bologna

Computer simulations of organic functional materials have progressed a great deal in the last decade, pushed also by the amazing increase of some three orders of magnitude in supercomputer resources. This has allowed to effectively add atomistic approaches to the current arsenal of modelling and simulation tools, making it possible to predict physical properties such as transition temperatures, order parameters and molecular organizations in the bulk and close to interfaces. In the talk we plan to show a number of recent examples of atomistic molecular dynamics simulations of liquid crystalline systems, trying to assess the current state of the art and some potential developments.