Tom Haxton

Molecular Foundry Challenge Grant Postdoctoral Fellow
Theory of Nanostructured Materials Facility
tkhaxton@lbl.gov

Ph. D., Physics, University of Pennsylvania (2010)
S. B., Mathematics and Physics, University of Chicago (2004)

Research Interests

My research uses statistical mechanical theory and coarse-grained modeling to explain the dynamics of condensed matter systems.

At the Molecular Foundry, my research has focused on developing design rules for the self-assembly of anisotropic building blocks into materials with nanoscale structure. Inspired by Foundry experiments by the group of Jim De Yoreo and in collaboration with Foundry experimentalists Caroline Ajo-Franklin and Behzad Rad, Steve Whitelam and I have developed a set of design rules for the crystallization of a model protein that illustrates fundamental and overlooked differences in the ways that anisotropic and isotropic systems self-assemble. We are also collaborating on a User Project with Foundry electronic structure theorists Isaac Tamblyn and Jeff Neaton and the group of Tony Heinz of Columbia University to explain the complex phase diagrams of small molecular adsorbates on metal surfaces.

Under the supervision of Andrea Liu, my Ph.D. work focused on the dynamics of mechanically driven, disordered materials. We demonstrated that the dynamics of soft, repulsive spheres exhibit universal behavior with respect to a dimensionless jamming phase diagram. Moreover, we showed that the behavior of these models driven far from equilibrium are controlled by a well-defined effective temperature. While at the Foundry, I continued this work to illustrate the mechanisms by which the effective temperature controls the dynamics of repulsive particles by investigating the relationship between dynamics and effective temperature in the hard-sphere limit.

Publications

  • L. J. Daniels, T. K. Haxton, N. Xu, A. J. Liu, and D. J. Durian, “Temperature-pressure scaling for air-fluidized grains on approaches to Point J,” Phys. Rev. Lett., in press (arXiv:11105611).
  • T. K. Haxton and S. Whitelam, “Design rules for the self-assembly of a protein crystal,” Soft Matter, Advance Article (2012).
  • T. K. Haxton, “Ratio of effective temperature to pressure controls the mobility of sheared hard spheres,” Phys. Rev. E 85, 011503 (2012).
  • M. Schmiedeberg, T. K. Haxton, S. R. Nagel, and A. J. Liu, “Mapping the glassy dynamics of soft spheres onto hard-sphere behavior,” EPL 96, 36010 (2011).
  • T. K. Haxton, M. Schmiedeberg, and A. J. Liu, “Universal jamming phase diagram in the hard-sphere limit,” Phys. Rev. E 83, 031503 (2011).
  • T. K. Haxton and A. J. Liu, “Kinetic heterogeneities at dynamical crossovers,” EPL 90, 6604 (2010).
  • N. Xu, T. K. Haxton, A. J. Liu, and S. R. Nagel, “Equivalence of glass transition and colloidal glass transition in the hard-sphere limit,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 245701 (2009). Editor's suggestion. Physics synopsis
  • T. K. Haxton and A. J. Liu, “Activated dynamics and effective temperature in a steady state sheared glass,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 99, 195701 (2007).