Physics

Dr. Sumantra Sarkar
Los Alamos National Laboratory

Biomolecular dynamics emerge from complex interactions of a large number of molecules in cells. The resultant dynamics spans a wide range of spatiotemporal scales (picosecond-second and nanometer-micrometer). In addition, spatial confinement and correlations impart non-negligible contributions to the emergent dynamics. Therefore, theoretical studies of biomolecular dynamics must resolve the spatiotemporal scales inherent in the study. In this talk, I’ll briefly describe a recently developed theoretical method, called Green’s Function Reaction Dynamics (GFRD), that achieves this goal. GFRD is almost a million times faster than traditional molecular dynamics methods, which allows it to access seconds and minutes timescale at the expense of very little spatial details. As a result, it has opened up new vistas in biomolecular dynamics for theoretical explorations. In this talk, I’ll present two different problems that I have been working on: (A) how dynamics at microscopic spatiotemporal scales influences macroscopic behavior and (B) how reaction kinetics is modified in the presence of spatial heterogeneity. Although these results were developed in the context of biomolecular dynamics, they can be applied to study self-assembly, nucleation, and many other reaction-diffusion problems in soft matter physics.