Physical Chemistry Seminar – Nitesh Kumar, Chemistry Graduate Student

About the event

Speaker: Nitesh Kumar, chemistry graduate student

Group: Aurora Clark

Title: Understanding interfacial adsorption of amphiphiles through the lens of persistent homology

Abstract: We propose persistent homology based topological descriptors to characterize the morphology of amphiphile adsorption surfaces at liquid/liquid interfaces. Our results demonstrate that the descriptors like 0- and 1-dimensional Betti curves, persistent entropy, and the non-ideality index could distinguish the ensemble-average interfacial organization and the time-evolution of the adsorbed amphiphile at the interface. The presentation will provide an overview of the mathematics behind persistent homology and the methodology used to analyze molecular simulation data of liquid/liquid interfaces. This approach is generalizable for studying more complex molecular sorption patterns on solid-air, air-water, oil-air, and biological surrogate membranes.