News

Over the past week, Eleanor was in Paris at the CECAM Conference 'Fluctuations in Charged and Soft matter', where she presented a poster on 'Hydrodynamic interactions in driven but stationary colloidal suspensions'. It was great to discuss with other Soft Matter researchers!

We are delighted that our latest paper has been featured on the front cover of the latest edition of Soft Matter!

This week, James was away at the Institut Etudes Scientifiques de Cargese at the 'Transport in Narrow Channels III' workshop. James gave a talk on "Interpreting confined transport signals with model systems" - it was great to connect with researchers across the transport community

Paper alert! Our latest paper discusses some of the unexpected dynamics of multicore magnetic dimers. Take a look here to learn more.

New research from the group is out in JCP in collaboration with Prof Sophie Marbach (Sorbonne, Paris) - what can we learn about the coupling between adsorption and diffusion processes in nanopores? Here, we examine the effects of these processes on the power spectrum of number fluctuations in channels using theory and simulation. Paper available at: https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0288288

After a very productive summer, we are sad to say goodbye to Prof. Kurt Andresen as he heads back across the pond to Gettysburg! This is not the end of our collaboration, though, as we will be continuing to work with him virtually this year.

Welcome to Prof. Kurt Andresen, who will be joining us for three months this summer while on sabbatical from Gettysburg College, Pennsylvania! We are really excited to work with him in the lab.

Welcome to our new PDRA, Bryan, who joins us to work on exciting DNA/nanopore projects! His PhD at The Chinese University of Hong Kong focused on characterization of the structural and chemical properties of non-canonical DNA structures.

Congratulations to our third year DPhils Anna and Eleanor on excellent presentations at the Oxford Women in Chemistry Conference. Particular congratulations to Anna for being awarded best overall talk!

The group's annual pumpkin carving makes its return with our very own (health and safety compliant) fireplace!

We are delighted to have welcomed our Part II students (Tim, Lucy and Charles) to the group in October. You can read more about their research here.

We also hosted two excellent interns over the summer – Tina Chou and Hester Bieber – join us during the break. We wish them all the best with the rest of their studies.

Thorneywork Group on Tour!

The Thorneywork Group was out in force at the Liquid Matter Conference 2024, hosted in Mainz, Germany.

Alice gave a talk titled "Current fluctuations reveal transport mechanisms in a colloidal micropore" and Jessica, Anna, Eleanor and James all presented posters. It was great to connect and catch-up up with so many brilliant scientists in the community!

This week the Thorneywork Lab received its Bronze certification as part of the Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework (LEAF). We are very excited to have begun our sustainability journey and look forward to continuing in this direction.

Congratulations to our first year PRS, James, for winning the poster prize at the IOP Advanced School in Liquids and Complex Fluids last week!

The Thorneywork group was out in force today at the Oxford Soft Matter Away day in Christchurch. Congratulations to our DPhils for their presentations, particularly to Eleanor and James who won poster prizes!

Last week, we welcomed our collaborators - Prof Sophie Marbach and Adam Carter (Sorbonne, Paris) and Prof Brennan Sprinkle and Grace Mattingly (Colorado School of Mines) - for a workshop on 'The Countoscope'. Lots of exciting developments incoming!

Congratulations to our postdoc, Dr Jessica Carder, on the publication of her latest paper "Thermodynamics and S-Palmitoylation Dependence of Interactions between Human Aquaporin-4 M1 Tetramers in Model Membranes" in ACS!

How much can you learn about a system just by counting particles? We explore this question in our new paper on arxiv.

Here, in a collaboration with Sophie Marbach (Sorbonne, Paris) and Brennan Sprinkle (Colorado School of Mines, USA) we combine experiments, simulation and theory to show have careful statistical analysis of number fluctuations can be used to probe details of self and collective particle dynamics

Anna presented the group poster at the Oxford Women in Chemistry Symposium today. Congratulations to Anna for winning a poster prize!

We have had a busy and exciting few months as five new members have joined the team.

In September, we welcomed Jessica Carder to the group as our new PDRA, alongside our Part II students Mohammed Ahmed, Lucas Ipkendanz and Jon Starkey. And in October, James Tett started his DPhil in the group. 

Read more about their research here. 

We were also very lucky to have two excellent summer interns – Tina Chou and Poramas Komonvasee – join us during the break. We wish them all the best of luck with the rest of their studies.

Huge congratulations to Anna for being awarded a prize for her poster presentation ‘Cation dependence of noise induced by polymers in nanopores‘ at the recent Faraday Discussions meeting on Iontronics in Edinburgh, UK.

Many congratulations to Anna for having her artistic image of our nanopore device featured as part of the Chemistry Department's photo competition. Read more here.

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Big congratulations to Stuart for passing his PhD viva with (very) minor corrections. After two months helping to set up the lab in Oxford, Stuart will soon start a new job in London. We wish him all the best for the future!

From September 2022 the group will have a new home at the Physical and Theoretical Chemistry Laboratory, University of Oxford. We're sad to leave so many friends and colleagues in Cambridge but excited for the adventures ahead!

Great to see some collaborative work with Jeffrey Mc Hugh finally published (also here on arXiv).  Here, we describe a method to map flow fields outside nanopores in their full three-dimensional glory by exploiting optical tweezers and some neat particle tracking techniques. 

Exciting news for the new year! Our group has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant! The project aims to investigate the origins of noise and fluctuations in soft systems driven out of equilibrium using a unique combination of state-of-the-art experimental model systems. These will exploit a huge range of techniques including colloids, microfluidics, optical tweezers, nanopores, nanoparticles and DNA nanotechnology. Alice discusses more about the project here.

To tackle this ambitious project we will soon be recruiting a diverse and interdisciplinary team. Watch this space for more detail

Our recent ArXiv paper exploring how careful analysis of ionic current fluctuations can be used to probe polymer adsorption in nanopores has a new home in PRL! Super excited to see this appear as the result of a fantastic cross-disciplinary collaboration. 

https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.127.137801

I'm absolutely delighted to be one of the 37 new University Research Fellows appointed by the Royal Society this year. This amazing award will support me in pursuing the exciting new experiments we are planning in the group, aiming to understand fundamental aspects of fluctuations and transport in soft matter systems.

Our new paper investigating the noise signatures associated with passive adsorption of polymers in nanopores is now available on arXiv. Here we combine detailed analysis of ionic current traces, Quartz Crystal Microbalance measurements and simulations to explore how characteristic noise in the ionic current trace reflects passive adsorption of polymers to the pore surface.

In a very exciting week three new papers have now appeared online!

In Science Advances, ‘Direct detection of molecular intermediates from first-passage times' discusses a method to reveal details of energy landscapes from analysis of dynamic properties. Some exciting experimental collaborations with the Bayley group (University of Oxford) and Ritort group (University of Barcelona) and with theorist Anatoly Kolomeisky (Rice University) allowed us to demonstrate how our method can be used to count intermediate states across a diverse range of systems – colloids, biological nanopores an

Our new paper looking at the noise in rectifying and non-rectifying nanopores has just appeared online.

Here,  we studied the behaviour of conical glass nanopores as components in ionic circuits, showing that while net conduction is bulk dominated, the low frequency noise is surface dominated. 

Stuart F. Knowles, Ulrich F. Keyser and Alice L. Thorneywork, ‘Noise properties of rectifying and non-rectifying nanopores', Nanotechnology, 31 (10), 10LT01 (2019)

Alice presented work on analysing first passage time distributions to uncover energy landscapes in talks at the 5th International Soft Matter Conference in Edinburgh (June 2019) and the ‘Transport Phenomena in Complex Environments' conference in Erice, Sicily (September 2019). 

Following on from her RSC SMTG young scientist award, the Oxford Scientist Magazine has featured some of Alice's work on the 2D melting transition. Read her article here: https://oxsci.org/studying-the-2d-melting-transition/

Alice has won the 2019 RSC Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics Group (SMTG) Young Scientist Award for her experimental work on the two-dimensional melting of colloidal hard spheres (PRL 118, 158001 (2017)). The prize is awarded for ‘exceptional contributions in the field of statistical mechanics and thermodynamics' and was awarded in recognition of her experimental resolution of a decades-old debate. She will give her Award Lecture during the Annual Meeting of the SMTG group in Manchester, 9-11 January 2019.

New paper in Mol. Phys. ‘Structure factors in a two-dimensional binary colloidal hard sphere system' now online

New paper on 2D melting published in Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter out now!