Physical/Theoretical Chemistry Seminar: Professor David Limmer, UC Berkeley

Physical/Theoretical Chemistry Seminar: Professor David Limmer, UC Berkeley (Host: Grant Rotskoff)

About the Seminar

"Ionic transport in nanoscale fluids far from equilibrium"

In this talk, I will discuss some of our recent efforts to apply a burgeoning understanding of systems driven far from equilibrium to questions in nanofluidics. Specifically, I will show how on small scales where surface to volume ratios are large, molecular details dictate observable behaviors by determining the relevant boundary conditions for fluid flows. Further, large driving forces are omnipresent on small scales requiring novel theories to relate molecular fluctuations to nonlinear response. I will show how stochastic thermodynamics can be used to construct appropriate theories, which we have applied to questions of electric-field dependent ionic conductivities and dissociation rates. Specific generalizations of Green-Kubo theory for transport coefficients and transition state theory for rate constants to far from equilibrium regimes will be discussed and used to explore fluids confined to nanoscale dimensions. Throughout, these results are made possible by novel simulation techniques we have developed to interrogate rare fluctuations around nonequilibrium steady-states that are underpinned by large deviation theory and stochastic control theory. 

About the Speaker

David Limmer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at University of California Berkeley, a Research Scientist in the Materials and Chemical Sciences Divisions of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and a Fellow of the Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute. He received his B.S. in chemical engineering in 2008 from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, and his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley under the supervision of David Chandler. From 2013-2016, David was an independent fellow of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science working closely with Garnet Chan. David has been recognized as a Heising-Simons Fellow of the Kavli Foundation, a Scialog Fellow of the Research Corporation for Science and Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and a Hellman Fellow. In 2019, he was the recipient of the Department of Energy Early Career Award, and in 2021 he was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship.

Image credit: Charlene Borsack