Complex Materials Theory Group

Welcome to the Torquato Group!

Professor Salvatore Torquato, Lewis Bernard Professor of Natural Sciences, is the Director of the Complex Materials Theory Group. Our research group is based at Princeton University in the Department of Chemistry, the Princeton Institute of Materials, and the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science. We also have affiliations with three other departments/programs: Physics, Applied and Computational Mathematics, and Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering. Research work in the group is centered in statistical mechanics and soft condensed matter theory.
Our current research topics of interest include unusual low-temperature states of matter, packing problems, structure and bulk properties of colloids, liquids, glasses, quasicrystals and crystals, hyperuniformity, novel photonic materials, discrete geometry, self-assembly theory, disordered heterogeneous materials, optimization in materials science, cancer modeling, and biophysics. For more information, please see our News page.

A recording of Professor Torquato's seminar on hyperuniformity given at the Institute for Advanced Study on February 25th 2022.
Simulated steady state flow through a Gaussian random field microstructure.
Three different "classes" of degenerate Debye random media.
A maximally random jammed (MRJ) sphere packing and its associated Voronoi cells.
Metastable and glassy water phase diagram in the temperature-pressure plane.
Photonic networks: (a) the crystal diamond network and (b) the disordered nearly hyperuniform network model.
Schematic showing how the critical pore size of a dispersion of hard disks can be determined from the corresponding Voronoi diagram.
Schematic showing the preparation of a jammed packing of curved triangles via the stochastic adaptive shrinking cell algorithm, as well as the associated spectral density of the packing.
For any nonzero temperature, Henderson's theorem is not practically applicable if very similar pair correlation functions correspond to distinctly different pair potentials.