Jon Fernsler
Discover
Researching the physics of soft matter, biophysics, and sustainability with undergraduate students.
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At CU Boulder I became fascinated by liquid crystals, a form of matter that is fluid but also has order like a crystal. This mixture of order and disorder can lead to incredibly complex organizations of molecular structure that must be puzzled out like a detective story. Due to another property called birefringence (light travels at different speeds depending on how its polarization is oriented relative to a material axis), liquid crystals often appear beautifully colorful in a polarized light microscope. With the Clark group, I helped discover three new phases of matter published on the covers of Science, Proceedings of the National of Sciences, and Liquid Crystals.
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Microscopy
LEGO Brewster Angle Microscope (BAM)
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A picture is worth a thousand words and a microscopy image may be worth far more. Imaging microscopic structures is both interesting and challenging. I have pursued many different tools to do this, including polarized light microscopy, fluorescence microscopy, freeze-fracture electron microscopy, reflection microscopy, Brewster angle microscopy (BAM) and more. I love taking images on microscopes and building the microscopes myself almost as much. Since I lacked funding to buy a BAM, Cal Poly students and I designed and built our own BAM almost entirely from LEGO bricks that rivals the quality of a $50k research-grade instrument. We published our design in the American Journal of Physics along with a lab class lesson, which has become a component of the physical chemistry lab class taken by all Cal Poly chemistry majors. About 1000 chemistry students have used the BAM since its development and other universities around the world have built a BAM from our design.
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Fluctuations
A laser (left) bleaches dye leaving a black spot (right) which diffuses in a molecular monolayer (green laser color added to grayscale image)
Quantum dots grow aggregates within a smectic liquid crystal
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The microscopic world is far different from our own where instead of a calm inertia-controlled world, fluctuations that drive diffusion and chaos rule. It has recently been shown that in regular 3D liquids, a change in concentration over a distance (a gradient) drives fluctuations in concentration that go far beyond the expected microscopic molecular scale in size (nanometer or one billionth of a meter), into our own mesoscopic scale (100 micrometers about the width of human hair). In a 2D liquid these fluctuation have been theorized, but never before seen, to be greater still in size. Funded by the National Science Foundation Division of Materials Research, my undergraduate research group has been pursuing measurement of these fluctuations and have seen our first evidence of these so-called giant fluctuations. We use fluorescence microscopy of dye inserted into a molecular monolayer on the surface of water to image molecular fluctuations and use an intense Class IV laser to break apart a region of dye to induce a difference in dye concentration. In a second experiment, we study how fluctuations affect aggregation (sticking together) of special molecules called "quantum dots" dispersed into another 2D liquid, a liquid crystal film suspended in air.
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Sustainability
Dunaliella algae
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Algae broken apart (lysed) using sonication for biofuel
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I am passionate about fighting climate change and excited about the energy revolution that our world is undergoing. Solar panels on my house provide nearly all my electricity and charge my family's two electric cars. It's a fun experimental challenge to find ways to reduce my carbon: like eating vegetarian, insulating my house and installing a heat pump. In research, I pursue a project to use algae as a biofuel that can be nearly net-zero since algae pulls nearly as much carbon out of the atmosphere when it grows as when burned as biofuel, it can be grown with few inputs, and it does not displace cropland. Electrification is the way to go for most of our energy, but biofuel has a place in international shipping, long-distance flights, metal processing and other applications. Our multi-disciplinary research group features biologists, electrical and mechanical engineers, and physicists to devise efficient means to "lyse" (break apart) algae cells to extract the lipids that can become biofuel. We are pursuing both pulsed electric fields and ultrasonic cavitation to achieve lysis.
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