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Christopher Burke is a member of Prof. Tim Atherton’s group in the physics department which makes heavy use of the research cluster. Their focus is soft condensed matter, i.e. complicated solids and fluids such as emulsions, colloids, and liquid crystals. Simulations allow them to understand the behavior of these complex systems, which are often difficult to study analytically. Graduate student Chris Burke is studying how particles can be packed onto curved surfaces. This is in order to understand, for example, how micron-sized polymer beads would arrange themselves on the surface of an oil droplet. He uses the cluster to run large numbers of packing simulations and to analyze the large data sets that result. Post-doc Badel Mbanga and undergraduate Kate Voorhes study the behavior of coalescing droplets coated with liquid crystals. In particular, they are interested in the behavior of defects in the liquid crystal layer as coalescence occurs. They run computationally expensive simulations which would be impractical without the computing power available on the cluster.