Active and Living Matter Group

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 living matter as you are a vast (approximately 37 trillion) collection of cells, with each and every one of them, including its sub-components, 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 the single- and collective-levels. The scientific problems that interest us include fundamental questions ranging from the origin of motility at the single-particle level to flocking tendencies in large collections. 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 a deeper physical understanding of our research theme, I strongly encourage you to read the pedagogical article I wrote for the Resonance magazine (Click here to read the article.). Here, I introduced the field of active soft condensed matter and emphasized its significance for the biological sciences in clear, accessible language, aiming to build physical intuition for the subject through familiar, everyday examples.