g(r) -> u(r)

Dirk Aarts studied chemistry at the University of Utrecht (the Netherlands) and subsequently moved to the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris (France) as a Marie Curie Fellow. In 2007 he took up a lectureship at the Physical and Theoretical Chemistry Laboratory of the University of Oxford (UK), combined with a Fellowship at Christ Church. He was made full professor in 2013. From 2015-2018 he was the coordinator of the European Innovative Training Network (ITN-ETN) called ‘DiStruc’. From 2019-2024 he took up a leadership role in Christ Church, where he also was the academic lead of the institution (2021-24). He’s now the Trustee with responsibility for a new Centre for Education in Entrepreneurship and Innovation.

Dirk Aarts has won a number of prizes and awards, including the Andries Miedema prize. His research interests lie in the field of soft and biological matter, where his group combines experiment, theory and simulations to address both fundamental and applied problems. His work is typically multi- and interdisciplinary and collaborations are with groups from applied maths, to pathology, to medicine. Parts of the work are also funded by industry. He has published in Science, Nature Phys, Nature Chem, PNAS etc.

Abstract:

The pair distribution function g(r) plays a central role in liquid state theory, linking structure and thermodynamics. It is typically measured by constructing a histogram of the distances between all pairs of particles, which is used in simulations and experiments where single particle coordinates can be obtained. Here, we present a novel method based on Henderson’s method for measuring the cavity distribution function. The method measures g(r) in a highly efficient way; moreover, it allows us to obtain an effective pair potential between colloidal particles in experiment.