Research Projects

The physics of active matter, where the constituent particles/building blocks perform motions predominantly due to their self-propulsion forces along with thermal driving, became one of the hot topics of research in condensed and soft matter physics primarily due to its ubiquitous appearance in various natural systems which includes a flock of birds, school of fishes, ants colony, bacterial colony, cell cytoplasm, the wound healing process, cancer progression. These systems are also abundant in various artificial/synthetic systems like thermophoretic Janus colloids, vibrated granular systems etc. Active matters in dense limits have recently shown many characteristic features of glassy systems. These led to a renewed interest in studying these systems in their glassy states (active glasses) to understand the physics of glass formation in these materials and find similarities and dissimilarities with their equilibrium counterparts. As there is no proven framework to understand these non-equilibrium systems using statistical mechanics, it is essential to see if a model system can be developed that will have active matter-like dynamical properties but will be in thermal equilibrium so that usual statistical mechanics can be applied to understand their behaviour. This project aims to develop and study a Hamiltonian model of particles with additional spin degrees of freedom and add nontrivial coupling between spin and velocity degrees. One would like a dynamical system that shows typical active matter-like systems. The success of such a project can have important implications for developing a theoretical framework for non-equilibrium systems in the near future.