CMMP11 venue

The latest UK Condensed Matter and Materials Physics Conference (CMMP11) took place on December 12-15 in Manchester. The Conference aimed to cover the most exciting and most rapidly developing areas of condensed matter, with experts in the field reporting on high-quality original research.

During these three days the a mix of several oral and the poster sessions gave a good opportunity to present so many works in different fields and to exchange ideas between participants. But sometimes it was really hard to understand the aim or the final results of work done.

The oral session on Polymer Physics commenced with an invited talk by Dr. Simon Hanna from the University of Bristol. He spoke about an interesting topic of DNA polymer chain inserted inside a square nanopore. The method of analysis used in this work was the FENE (Finitely Exstensible Nonlinear Elastic) model to simulate the flexible polymer and the Marko-Sigia approximation.

Another charming talk was given by a post-doc Jelena Jordanovic from the University of Liverpool. Her brilliant exposition was about porous organic molecular crystal by performing Molecular Dynamic simulation. This is a contemporary topic which applies for example as a media for H2 storage in energy application.

During the poster session there was a particularly attractive poster with the title ”Time Dependent Surface Area Analysis of Molecular Crystal” by a PhD Mark Lewis from the University of Liverpool. By using Molecular Dynamics and Monte Carlo simulations, he studied the time dependent Solvent Accessible Surface Area (SASA) data, where this algorithm uses a sphere (of solvent) of a particular radius to probe the surface of the molecule.

I was delighted, for the first time, to have the opportunity to give an oral presentation (around ten minutes) to talk about my PhD project of laterally confined diblock copolymers using Cell Dynamics Simulation method.

I found the conference was both very interesting and educational and I gained a significant benefit from its attendance. This will help to improve the work I am doing in my PhD project.