Integrated Calendar

This talk will use photographs and diagrams to illustrate and explain some of the beautiful optical phenomena observable in nature, such as ice‐crystal halos, rainbows, and sky colors, and will relate them to ongoing research into the spectral and spatial distribution of polarization in the atmosphere.
Our group at Montana State University has pioneered all‐sky imaging methods to study skylight polarization and relate it to properties of airborne particles, clouds, and the underlying surface. Brief results from a deployment of all‐sky polarization imagers at the August 2017 solar eclipse will be shown and related to a more general discussion of atmospheric optical effects that can be seen by eye. The talk takes its title from my 2017 book, which describes optical phenomena in nature, especially as seen through airplane windows.

The cytoskeleton is a highly dynamic three-dimensional network of polar filamentous proteins and molecular motors. It provides structural stability for biological cells and it also generates and transmits mechanical forces. For example, in mesenchymal cell motility actin filaments polymerize at their plus ends, which exerts pushing forces on the cell membrane. Here, we present a generic two-dimensional model for an active vesicle, where self-propelled filaments attached to semiflexible polymer rings form mechanosensitive self-propelled agents. We find universal correlations between shape and motility. To probe the internal dynamics of flexocytes, we study the effect of substrate patterning on their mechanical response. The active vesicles reproduce experimentally observed shapes and motility patterns of biological cells. They assume circular, keratocyte-like, and neutrophil-like shapes and show both persistent random and circling motion. Interestingly, explicit pulling forces only are sufficient to reproduce this cell-like behavior. Also for the reflection of the vesicles at walls and the deflection of their trajectories at friction interfaces we find parallels to the behavior of biological cells. Our model may thus serve as a filament-based, minimal model for cell motility.

One-dimensional materials represent an attractive class of nanostructures, mainly because of their geometry which inherently implies applications such as electrodes for sensing purposes or conduction channels in nanoscale electronics. Different mechanisms may be utilized to prepare nanowires, e.g. stress-driven one-dimensional diffusion, metal-catalyzed growth (VLS) etc. The most important role in identifying and description of the growth mechanisms is played by real-time microscopies, mostly TEM. However, although very powerfull in terms of image resolution, TEM is also limited in use, especially because of very strict sample geometry requirements. In this seminar talk, I will present our real-time in-situ scanning electron microscopy experiments of nanowire growth. Two different material systems will be presented – germanium nanowires catalyzed by Au nanoparticles and WOx nanowires. As for the latter case, our experiments reveal a very unusual oxidation mechanism of tungsten disulfide nanotubes, resulting in tungsten oxide nanowire formation. The talk will summarize studies on quasi-1D systems conducted at IPE and CEITEC BUT.

A Brownian motor rectifies thermal noise and creates useful work. Here we address how this machine can emerge without predefined energy minimum in a system out of thermal equilibrium. Intuitively, Brownian motor as any artificial or biological machine should degrade with time. I will show that on contrary, a system with multiple degrees of freedom out of thermal equilibrium can be stable at a state that generates useful work.

It is demonstrated with the help of ab initio analysis of a modified Feynman-Smoluchowski ratchet with two degrees of freedom. Out of thermal equilibrium, an environment imposes effective mechanical forces on nano-fabricated devices as well as on microscopic chemical or biological systems. Thus out of thermal equilibrium environment can enforce a specific steady state on the system by creating effective potentials in otherwise homogeneous configuration space.

I present an ab initio path from the elastic scattering of a single gas particle by a mechanical system to the transition rate probability between the states of the system with multiple degrees of freedom, together with the corresponding Masters-Boltzmann equation and the average velocities of the system’s degrees of freedom as functions of the macroscopic parameters of the out-of-equilibrium environment. It results in Onsager relations that include the influence of the different degrees of freedom on each other.

An interesting finding is that some of these forces persist even in a single temperature environment if the thermodynamic limit does not hold. In addition, the spatial asymmetry of the system’s stable state, together with the corresponding directed motion, may possess preferred chiral symmetry.