The birth, life, and death of dissipative colloidal crystals

SERİM İLDAY

MSN Graduate Program and UNAM

In 1994 Erwin Schrödinger published an inspiring book titled “What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell.” Using only physical and mathematical reasoning, he concluded that the information necessary to replicate the living is most likely stored in an aperiodic crystal before the discovery of DNA. This provoked -at the time- the radical idea that, despite its complexity, life can be described by mathematical rules governing physical processes. Since then, the idea has been explored theoretically with simple models such as cellular automata, originally introduced by von Neumann, or with highly complex biochemical experiments. There is a lack of the experimental counterpart of the simple theoretical models.

Several years ago, we designed the simplest experimental system that can still manifest the key characteristics of living organisms. Our system does not involve any biochemical interactions but only purely physical effects. We showed that artificial atoms (strongly Brownian polystyrene spheres sustained in water) can form autocatalytic, dynamic adaptive crystals with a garden variety of patterns (Nature Commun. 2017). We further formulated the physical processes of their emergence and uncovered universality (Nature Phys. 2020). Understanding the rules behind their “birth” and “life” motivated us to study their “death,” which led to the discovery that one-time-only energy delivery may be enough to form connections between initially uncorrelated and spatially distant atoms (JPCM 2021). In this talk, I will walk you through this journey and explore the possibility of approaching life from first principles.

About The Speaker

Serim’s research is at the intersection of soft condensed matter, active matter, self-assembly, complexity, nonequilibrium statistical physics, and nonlinear dynamics. She is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Materials Science and Nanotechnology & National Nanotechnology Research Center (UNAM) at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey, which she joined in December 2017. Before that, she was a postdoctoral researcher and later a research scientist at the Physics Department at Bilkent University. She received her Ph.D. from Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey, in 2014. She is the recipient of prestigious awards and recognitions, including the L’Oreal-UNESCO For Women in Science (FWIS) in 2018 and European Research Council Starting Grant (ERC-StG) in 2019. She has been a Fellow of the Young Academy of Europe (YAE) since 2020 and was elected as an ‘Emerging Leader’ in condensed matter physics by the Editorial Board of the Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter the same year. Her research has been published in renowned journals, including Nature Physics, Nature Photonics, Nature Communications, and Nano Letters.

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