Speaker
Charles Reichhardt (Los Alamos National Laboratory)
(Los Alamos National Laboratory)
Description
I will give an overview of how systems with competing
interactions such as repulsion on one scale and attraction
on another can generically give rise rise to bubble, stripe,
clump, and other patterns. The same patterns can occur for
systems with purely repulsive interactions provided there
are two or more distinct length scales in the potential. I
will show how these patterns can arise in soft matter
systems, charge ordered systems, neutron stars in the form
of pasta phases, and in the recently proposed type-1.5
superconductors. Under application of an external drive
these systems can also exhibit numerous nonequilibrium phase
transitions which produce pronounced changes in the
transport properties. I will also discuss how pattern
formation in these systems can be influenced by a patterned
substrate such as a periodic array of two-dimensional
pinning sites.
