Welcome to our lab website. We are an experimental group working in the field of active and living matter physics. Living matter simply means a collection of entities that are literally alive, typically consume food and show motility. For example, you are a living matter as you are a vast (approximately 37 trillion) collection of cells, with each and every one of them, including its sub-components, being alive. If you create a non-living system that moves like living organisms, we call it active matter—for example, robots, drones, vehicles, molecular motors, etc.

In our lab, we work with mechanical imitations of living organisms with the primary goal of understanding the laws that govern their physical properties at a single and collective scale. The scientific problems that interest us include fundamental questions ranging from the origin of their motility at the single particle level to the flocking tendency in their large collection. More specifically, we design and develop programmable robotic devices to mimic bio- and nature-inspired active dynamics and model them to understand living systems. We conduct our research using methodologies and tools from Statistical Physics, Condensed Matter Physics, Biological Physics, and Liquid Crystals.

The other aim of the group is to investigate the physics of Soft Condensed Matter. Constituents of such materials are typically micrometers large (a thousand times bigger than an atom/molecule) and bonded together with energies of the order of a few kBT (i.e., a hundred times weaker than typical covalent bonds). We explore problems related to the evaporative self-assembly of anisotropic colloidal particles, the physics of static and active granular matter, and the physics of the cell cytoskeleton. For more information, visit the list of publications and media stories/research highlights.