Georgia Tech physics professor Uzi Landman kicks off the 2014-2015 "Frontiers in Science" lecture series at the College of Sciences at Georgia Tech with a talk about his investigations into the realm of nanoscience and how the rules of the material world seem different at that tiny dimension. After the talk there will be a reception and time for visitors to chat with Landman and each other. 

Talk summary: Materials at the nanoscale exhibit unique properties that reflect the non-scalable character of materials at this reduced length scale. These properties are often of emergent nature - that is, they are not commonly expected, or deduced, from knowledge learned at larger sizes. Through the development of computer-based classical and first-principles quantum computations and simulations we highlight and demonstrate such behavior in diverse nanoscale systems. The research program illustrated in this talk is pursued at the Georgia Tech Center for Computational Materials Science (CCMS), with the aim of uncovering through the use of nanoscale computational microscopy the physical origins that underlie and govern the size-evolution of materials properties when small is different.