Research

Soft matter physics aims to understand complex materials and systems that owe their physical properties to interactions among mesoscopic building blocks, often strongly influenced by disorder and stochastic fluctuations. From its origins in studies of polymers and liquid crystals, the field of soft matter has grown to encompass a wide range of systems and techniques.

Our group works on a variety of problems involving elasticity, mechanics, and statistical physics, with two main sources of inspiration:

• Designer matter: Thanks to advances in fabrication techniques ranging from rapid prototyping to self-assembly, we have an ever-improving ability to fabricate desired structures across varied length scales. This motivates the question: if we can build any material, what should we build? How do we design structures that harbour novel and potentially useful mechanical properties?

• Biology: Biological structures such as DNA, cell membranes and the cytoskeleton are textbook examples of “soft matter”, whose shape and mechanical properties emerge from interactions among mesoscopic building blocks and are strongly influenced by stochastic forces due to temperature and active metabolic processes. Geometry and randomness are also key players in the propagation of genetic information through time and space during evolution.

These problems are tackled through a combination of theoretical and computational techniques. We also benefit from collaborations with experimental groups and from conducting our own laboratory demonstrations when the opportunity arises.

Below are summaries of current and past research projects under these themes.