Research interests and activities by Patrick Ilg

In magnetic suspensions, field-induced cluster formation of magnetic particles gives raise to a macroscopic magnetization as well as strongly anisotropic mechanical and viscous properties. We are using computer simulations to study the flow- and field-induced structure of magnetic fluids as well as their viscous behavior and compare those findings to experimental results. The possibility to manipulate fluid properties simply by changing an externally applied magnetic field make these fluids very attractive for various applications.

Magnetic nanoparticles are ideal model systems to study long-standing issues in nonequilibrium statistical physics such as large fluctuations and strongly nonlinear response functions. Various technical and biomedical applications rely on and exploit this behavior.

Coarsening polymeric networks provide versatile model systems to study long-standing open issues in the physics of amorphous and glassy systems, where even the very definition of a characteristic length scale is controversial. Moreover, transiently crosslinked networks formed by semiflexible polymers are ubiquitous in biological and food systems.
[Movie courtesy of M. Kröger, ETH Zürich]

To describe flow and backflow effects of complex fluids, we explore to couple a flexible fluid dynamics solver such as Multi-Particle Collision Dynamics Method with Brownian Dynamics simulations of the microstructure.