Colloquium Ehrenfestii

Location: De Sitterzaal

Time: 19:30 hrs

abstract
In the past decade there has been a marked interest among physicists
in the properties of nanoconfined DNA. In biology, double-stranded DNA is
compacted in viruses, bacteria and eukaryotic cells in such a fashion
that the statistical physics of DNA chains has to be dealt with on the
nanolevel. In biological physics, DNA has been confined within
nanochannels, nanoslits and nanopores; these experiments have
impacted on the emerging field of genomics. In this talk I'll focus on
the confinement of DNA in nanotechnological devices. Although the
behaviour of DNA in the bulk is fairly well understood, that of nanoconfined
DNA chains has `turned out to be unexpected and even paradoxical, and is
leading to taxing problems in statistical physics caused by the strong
inhomogeneities of the probability distributions. Fortunately, some headway
can also be made by sheer physical reasoning (e.g. by employing scaling
arguments).