Research

Currently I am interested in the following theoretical research areas:

1. Statistical physics of soft condensed matter

Soft matter includes: liquid crystals in your laptop screen, emulsion in your mayonnaise, and colloidal suspensions in many household products. Although the microscopic details of these matters are quite complicated, e.g. they might involve hydrogen-bond, or complex chemical interaction, the macroscopic behaviours of these systems are often very simple. One important result in statistical physics basically says that the macroscopic properties of these system can often be derived from symmetries alone (the same reason standard model of the universe is derived from symmetries).

2. Active matter

Active matter is a class of non-equilibrium systems, which violates time reversal symmetry (TRS) at the smallest scale. In this project, we try to understand how TRS-breaking at small scales (e.g. cell cycle and protein polymerisation) can be translated into new physics at larger scales (e.g. collective motion in tissues, animal locomotion and evolution).

3. Stochastic thermodynamics and time-irreversibility

From undergraduate thermodynamics, we often assumed thermodynamic processes to be quasi-static, equilibrium, and consist of a large number of particles N » 10²³. In this project, we aim to generalize classical theory of thermodynamics to systems which are far from equilibrium such as living matter, or small such as molecular engines.