"Basic research is like shooting an arrow into the air and, where it lands, painting a target."
-- Homer Adkins
Research Activities
Links and Downloads
Optical Trapping
Micron sized beads can be trapped in regions of high light intensity. A laser
beam wavefront can be sculpted by a computer generated hologram and focused on
an almost arbitrary intensity distribution. We're working on applications of
holographic optical micro- manipulation to microfluidics, statistical
mechanics, colloidal science.
[more]
Soft Matter
Life at the mesoscopic scale can be much different than our macroscopic world.
Fluids flow without inertia, liquid interfaces can be as hard as walls,
thermal agitation of the environment kicks so strongly that objects wander
around restlessly. We're interested in colloidal interactions, complex
rheology of suspensions, surface phenomena.
[more]
Statistical Mechanics
Thermal fluctuations drive dynamics on the meso and microscopic scales. Energy
provides the background landscape for the resulting motions. Using
experiments and computer simulations we look at both the single particle
Brownian motion in external force fields and the slow, cooperative relaxations
in glassy systems arising from highly complex multidimensional landscapes.
[more]
Microfluidics
We work at the design of new light driven devices and sensors providing non -
invasive tools to manipulate and analyze micro - environments such as
microfluidic devices or biological samples.
[more]
Micromotors pushed by biological entities, constitute a fascinating way to
convert chemical energy into mechanical work at the micrometer scale. We show
that a properly designed asymmetric object can be spontaneously set into the
desired motion when immersed in a chaotic bacterial bath.
[more]
HOTs with CUDA
Using the highly parallel architecture of modern graphics card, optimized
holograms can be calculated iteratively in real time.
[more]
Colloidal attraction in a temperature gradient
We report a novel strong and long ranged attraction induced by a thermal
gradient in the presence of a wall. Switching on and off the thermal gradient
we can rapidly and reversibly form stable hexagonal 2D crystals.
[more]
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