Lipid membranes on the arXiv

A while ago I discussed lipid membranes and how they could exhibit critical behaviour. There were some lovely pictures on criticality on giant unilamellar vesicles (GUVs) which are sort of model cell walls. That work was done by Sarah Keller and friends in Seattle.

This morning on the arXiv I saw this new paper, also by Sarah:

Dynamic critical exponent in a 2D lipid membrane with conserved order parameter

They look at the critical dynamics of the GUV's surface. Being embedded in a 3D fluid does have its consequences so they've attempted to account for the effect of hydrodynamic interactions. I haven't poured over their model but the paper looks really nice.

Paper review: Hexatic phases in 2D

I'm doing my journal club on this paper by Etienne Bernard and Werner Krauth at ENS in Paris:

First-order liquid-hexatic phase transition in hard disks

So I thought that instead of making pen-and-paper notes I'd make them here so that you, my huge following, can join in. If you want we can do it proper journal club style in the comments. For now, here's my piece.

Phase transitions in 2D

Dimension two is the lowest dimension we see phase transitions. In one dimension there just aren't enough connections between the different particles – or spins, or whatever we have – to build up the necessary correlations to beat temperature. In three dimensions there are loads of paths between A and B and the correlations really get going. We get crisp phase transitions and materials will readily gain long range order. Interestingly, while it should be easier and easier to form crystals in higher dimensions there do exist pesky glass transitions that get worse with increasing dimension. But I digress.

In two dimensions slightly strange things can happen. For one thing, while we can build nice crystals they are never quite as good as the ones you can get in 3D. What do I mean by this? Well in 3D I can give you the position of one particle and then the direction of the lattice vectors and you can predict exactly where every particle in the box will sit (save a bit of thermal wiggling). In 2D we get close, if I give you the position and lattice vectors then that defines the relative position and orientation for a long way – but not everywhere.

By "a long way" I mean correlations decay algebraically (distance to the power something) rather than exponentially (something to the power distance), which would be short ranged. We can call it quasi-long ranged.

Never-the-less, this defines a solid phase and this solid can melt into a liquid (no long range order of any kind). What is very interesting in two dimensions is that this appears to happen in two stages. First the solid loses its positional order, then it loses it's orientational order as well. This is vividly demonstrated in Fig 3. of the paper. The phase in the middle, with quasi-long range orientational order but short range positional order, is known as the hexatic phase.

When the lattice is shifted a bit the orientation can be maintained but the positions become disordered.

Six degrees - the documentary you can't see

A while back the BBC put on an documentary about networks called "Six Degrees". Normally when you see a documentary about a field that you're vaguely related to you feel a bit sick because they did it all wrong.

Well I have worked in networks a bit and I thought Six Degrees was excellent. It got a great balance of the historical study of networks and then it ran its own version of the Milgram experiment which was mostly used as a plot device to keep driving the story forwards. The people involved (Watts, Strogatz, Barabasi) were all very entertaining and successfully transmitted the excitement of scientific discovery.

Suffice to say it was great. I had planned to link to it and then discuss it a little bit. Annoyingly the BBC have switched off the iPlayer version of the programme and they now appear to have shutdown the version at top documentaries.

I know the beeb don't want to give away content for free but it strikes me that a resource this useful (I'd even recommend it to scientists new to the field) should be kept live. Instead it's buried away where it's now useless. Scientists are always told about public engagement, well unblock this film - engage!

I'm going to write to them an encourage them to let it free, then perhaps instead of a rant about the BBC we can talk about some science.

UPDATE:
As you can see from the comments, the BBC didn't make the film so they can't keep it online. I can't work out how to get a DVD yet but when I find out I'll put up a link and then can get on talking about networks. In the mean time, this book, "Small World" by Mark Buchanan is well worth a read.

Thoughts of a first-time peer reviewer

Most of my time is spent tirelessly chipping away at the scientific rock face, probably bogged down fixing a bug in my code or staring at some noisy looking data. Every now and then it all comes together and I want to tell people about it. So I write up my results as best I can, spend hours tinkering with figures, another few hours getting the fonts right on the axes, and after drafts and re-drafts, eventually I'll send it away to a journal to be published. This is where I become caught up in the process of peer review.

Usually it goes like this: The editor of the journal will check that the paper is basically interesting and then send it out to two reviewers who are chosen for their expertise in your area. These reviewers, or referees, will then read the paper, check it for basic errors and then comment on its originality and its pertinence to the field. This is sent back to the editor who will decide whether or not to publish. Usually the referees make you fix something, sometimes nothing, sometimes you can have a right old ding dong.

The main point is that the process is anonymous and behind closed doors. This is good and bad. Better blogs than this one discuss different options. It's not really my intention to criticise or support peer review, just to share my experiences.

Recently I was sent my first ever article to review. I can't say anything about the details, but it has been strange crossing over to the other side. I've had to ask questions that I have never thought much about before. So I wanted to put it down before I forget what all the fuss is about.

Reviewed

Up to now my only experience has been on the reviewed side of peer review. I've certainly had mixed experiences here. The first paper I had reviewed went through after lots of useful comments by the reviewers. It gave us more work but it made the paper better. Good experience. Another time a reviewer spotted a small error in our equations - also a good experience.

My worst experience involved two bad scenarios. Our first reviewer had not understood the paper, nor taken the time to follow the references that would allow him/her to do so. Instead of passing on to someone more qualified they just said it didn't make sense and was not interesting. The second referee had some interesting points but appeared to block it mainly on the basis that it didn't agree with other (presumably their) results. As you can see, I'm still bitter about this paper! It took 18 months to eventually get it through by which time it was thoroughly buried.

Of course, I'm biased, our paper could have been crap. Either way, the experience was bad enough that I was close to leaving science because of it. Receiving sneering anonymous reviews is a crushing blow to your ego - even if they're right.

Reviewer

So now I've reviewed my first paper. I won't say what I did, most of the questions I found myself asking would apply to any paper.

I'm quite used to reading other people's work, occasionally making a scoffing remark, or more likely not fully understanding it. The prospect of checking a paper for errors and assessing its quality filled me with dread. The only way I could deal with it was telling myself that it doesn't matter if I don't understand absolutely everything. The main thing is to check that they haven't done anything completely stupid.

This part of peer review I think is not too bad. There is an element of trust that someone has collected their data properly, but checking that it's not completely upside down is not too difficult or controversial.

Where it starts to get subtle is questioning the interpretation. Pulling someone up on their conclusion requires quite a bit of guts. Or I suppose an over inflated ego - of which there are many in science. This is related to another question, when should a scientific argument happen before publication and when should it happen afterwards? If the signal to noise ratio is to kept reasonably high then some things will need to be filtered out before hitting public view. I have not worked out an answer to this.

The final problem I had was with the question, "is this work of sufficient quality to be published in journal X?". Again this is really tricky, scientists can be real bitches when deciding what is or isn't interesting. On the other hand some scientists can try and get away with putting out any old crap just to lift their publication count. I found being asked to be the arbiter of quality quite stressful. Most results need to be on the scientific record somewhere, but should something be blocked for being too "incremental"? I suppose this is the journal's decision.

Is it worth it?

Apart from some initial stress I found the whole experience quite enjoyable. It makes you feel part of the scientific collective and it really tunes your critical skills. It will be interesting to see what becomes of peer review in the web 2.0 era, I would quite like to see it open up a little. I worry that unregulated, open anonymous comments, could be unhelpful. People are arseholes when they're anonymous, just ask a peer reviewer.

New domain

I've taken the domain name, kineticallyconstrained.com. For now don't change anything as the exact address might move about a bit. I haven't quite worked out what sub domains to use blah blah blah.

Eventually I plan to put some permanent content and develop the site a bit. For now, to be honest, I'm mostly testing that the RSS feed is still working!

Colloids are just right

All being good it looks like I've secured employment for a tiny while longer. Hooray!

The place I'm moving to is a big place for synthetic colloids, so it seems like a good time to go through what I know about colloids. If nothing else it'll be interesting to compare this to what I'll know in a year's time! So, here is a theorists perspective on colloid science.

I'll spare the usual introduction about how colloids are ubiquitous in nature, you can go to Wikipedia for that. The type of colloids I'm interested in here are synthetic colloids made in the lab. They're usually made from silica or PMMA (perspex), you can make a lot of them, they can be made so they're roughly the same size and you'll have them floating around in a solution. By playing with the solution you can have them density matched (no gravity) or you can have them sinking/floating depending what you want to study.

The colloids that people make sit nicely in a sweet spot of size and density that make them perfect for testing our fundamental understanding of why matter arranges itself in the way it does. Colloids can undergo most of the same phase transitions that we get in molecular systems, but here we can actually see them. Take for example this beautiful electron microscope image of a colloidal crystal from the Pine group at NYU.

1. They're big enough to image

Colloids are usually of the order a micron across. At this size it is still possible to use confocal microscopy to image the particles. While nothing like the resolution of the electron microscope, the confocal can actually track the positions of individual particles in real time, in solution. It's almost like a simulation without the periodic boundary conditions! A confocal can take lots of 2D slices through the sample, such as below from the Weeks group. The scale bar is 5 microns.

If you do it quick enough then you can keep track of the particle moving before it loses its identity. The Weeks group did some very famous work visualising dynamic heterogeneity in liquids near the glass transition. (see their science paper if you can).

If we want to think about colloids as model atoms, which we do, then there's another property apart from just their size that we need to be able to control.

2. You can control their interactions

Being the size they are, if we didn't do anything to our colloids after making the spheres they would stick together quite strongly due to van de Waals forces - this is the attraction between any smooth surface to another, as used by clingfilm. To counteract this the clever experimentalists are able to graft a layer of polymers around onto the surface of the colloid.

It's like covering it with little hairs. When the hairs from two particles come into contact they repel, overcoming the van de Waals attraction. The particles are "stabilised". In this way it's possible to make colloids that interact pretty much like hard spheres. So not only can we use them as model atoms, but we can use them to test theoretical models as well!

Further to this the colloids can be charged and by adding salt to the solvent one can control the screening length for attraction or repulsion to other colloids. Finally there's the depletion interaction. I want to come back to this so for now I'll just say that by adding coiled up polymers into the soup we can create, and tightly control, attractions between the colloids. With this experimentalists can tune their particles to create a zoo of different behaviours.

3. They're thermal

If the colloids are not too small to be imaged, why not make them bigger? If we made them, say 1cm, then we could just sit and watch them, right? Well not really. If you filled a bucket with ball bearings and solution, density matched them so they don't sink or float and then waited, you'd be there a long time. The only way to move them in a realistic amount of time is to shake them - this is granular physics.

Granular physics is great but it's not what we're doing here. Real atoms are subject to random thermal motions and they seek to fit the Boltzmann distribution. For this to work with colloids they need to be sensitive to temperature.

When a colloid is immersed in a fluid it subject to a number of forces. If it's moving then there will be viscous forces, and on an atomistic level it is constantly being bombarded by the molecules that comprise the fluid. In the interests of keeping this post to a respectable size I can't go through the detail, but suffice it to say that this is an old problem in physics - Brownian motion.

Under Brownian motion the large particle will perform a random walk that is characterised by its diffusion constant. The bigger this number the quicker it moves around. A more intuitive number is the time it takes for a particle to move a distance of one particle diameter. When you solve the equation of motion for a large particle in a Stokesian fluid you find that this time is given by

where is viscosity, a is the particle diameter, and k_B T is Boltzmann's constant and temperature. Now this does get more complicated in dense systems and the properties of the fluid matter, but this is a good start. This could be a topic for another post.

For a typical colloidal particle, around a micron in size, you have to wait about a second for it to move its own diameter. For something only as big as a grain of sand you can be waiting hours or days. Even by 10 microns it's getting a bit too slow. But close to 1 micron, not only does it move about in an acceptable time frame, we can easily track it with our confocal microscope. If it's diffusing around then we can hope that it will be properly sampling the Boltzmann distribution - or at the very least be heading there. So once again, that micron size sweet spot is cropping up.

So what else?

Hopefully this serves as a good starting point to colloids. Obviously there's a lot more to it. An area that I'm very interested in at the moment is what happens when the colloids are not spheres but some other shape. I'll be posting more about it in the coming months.

If you don't remember anything else just remember that colloids are the perfect size to test statistical mechanics and to be visible.

So well done colloids, you're just right size.

It's been a while

But I'm planning a dramatic comeback - just as soon as I've sorted my next job!

I've got some more critical-scaling stuff in the pipeline, some nice crystallisation videos and it may be time for some chat about self-assembly seeing as I'm now officially a self-assembler (self-assemblist?).

So don't delete Kinetically Constrained from your RSS reader just yet!