Category: seminar

Geo-fractal…somewhere over south India

I am always amazed to see fractal-like patterns….this one at a geographical scale…captured somewhere over south India..

I took the photo on my trip back to Pune from IIT Madras…

Thanks to IIT-M physics department for their invitation for colloquium…

Special thanks to Basudev Roy and Nirmala for hosting…. greatly enjoyed the discussion with many faculties and students..

In my talk, I mainly spoke on topics at the interface of statistical optics, Brownian motion and pattern formation..
Was delighted to see (and meet) Profs. Balki, Suresh Govindarajan Sunil Kumar Arnab Pal and many more in the audience.

The photo, retrospectively, captures the essence of the science discussed…

Soft Matter Optics – talk at ACS -India

About 2 years ago (22nd May 2020), when all the academic activities were online, I gave a talk on “Soft-Matter Optics: A Cabinet of Curiosities” organized by American Chemical Society as part of India Science Talks. Below is the embedded video of the online talk.

Link to ACS website can be found here.

In there, I give a broad overview of how interesting optical function can emerge from the complex world of soft matter. In addition to this, I have emphasized how optics can be harnessed to study structure and dynamics of soft-matter systems including colloids, liquid crystal and some biological matter. The target audience are new PhD students and anyone who is entering the field of light-soft matter interaction.

Hot Brownian Colloids – talk

On 19th Jan 2023, I gave a ~40 min talk on “Hot Brownian Colloids in Structured Optical Tweezers” in a very interesting conference on Frontiers in Non-Equilibrium Physics (FNEP) held at Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai.

I mainly spoke about emergent Brownian dynamics of laser-heated colloids under optical confinement. Below is the link to the talk.

I concluded my talk quoting P W Anderson’s essay “More is Different“

“The constructionist hypothesis breaks down when confronted with the twin difficulties of scale and complexity.  The behavior of large and complex aggregates of elementary particles, it turns out, is not to be understood in terms of a simple extrapolation of the properties of a few particles.

Instead, at each level of complexity entirely new properties appear, and the understanding of the new behaviors requires research which I think is as fundamental in its nature as any other.”

P.W. Anderson  ‘More is Different’
Science, 177, 4047 (1972)

More is not only different, but also wonderful !

My talk at ICTS

On 1st Dec 2022, I gave a talk on “Structured-Light Scattering : Implications in Momentum Space” as part of a discussion meeting on STRUCTURED LIGHT AND SPIN-ORBIT PHOTONICS held at International Center of Theoretical Sciences, Bangalore.

I mainly spoke about topological light scattering in the frame work of angular momentum of light and absorptive effects in optothermal tweezers created by structured light.

Below is the embedded video link to my talk. The playlist also has many other interesting talks related to the topic.