Vijayakumar Chikkadi
Assistant Professor
Physics
Soft condensed matter, Glasses, Active matter, Colloids
+91-20-25908482
vijayck@iiserpune.ac.in
My area of research is experimental soft condensed matter with a focus on active matter, colloidal glasses and crystals and their deformation under shear. Vijayakumar Chikkadi obtained his PhD from the University of Amsterdam and was at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems at Stuttgart and Ecole Normale Superieure at Lyon for post-doctoral research.
Research
Soft condensed matter, Glasses, Active matter
We investigate emergent properties of soft matter using colloidal suspensions. By tuning particles shape and interaction, and using external fields we tailor colloidal particles to mimic living and nonliving matter. This has allowed us to study condensed matter physics at convenient length and time scales. For example, crystallization, glass transition, elastic and plastic properties of amorphous solids, and active matter. Using microscopy and other techniques for three dimensional imaging, and novel instrumentation we span length scales from particle scale to macroscopic lengths to elucidate macroscopic properties from microscopic fluctuations.
Selected Publications
A. Pandit, A. Ghosh, V. Chikkadi, Modelling of strain field in sheared colloidal glasses, submitted.
T. Yu, A.G. Athanassiadis, M.N. Popescu, V. Chikkadi, A. Güth, D.P. Singh, P. Fischer. 2020. Microchannels with self-pumping walls, ACS Nano, 14(10), 13673-13680.
A. Morin, D.L. Cardozo, V. Chikkadi, D. Bartolo. 2017. Self-propulsion through disorder: Localization transition in active Lorentz gases, Phys Rev E 96 (4), 042611.
A. Ghosh, Z. Budrikis, V. Chikkadi, A.L. Sellerio, S. Zapperi, P. Schall. 2017. Direct observation of percolation in the yielding transition of colloidal glasses, Phys Rev Lett 118 (14), 2017.
V. Chikkadi, D. Midema, T. Dang, B. Nienhuis and P. Schall. 2014. Shearbanding of colloidal glasses - a dynamic first order transition, Editors choice Phys. Rev. Lett. 113(20), 208301.