News

The Tian group introduced a hydrogel derived from the malva nut with multiple biomedical applications, from wound care to ECG readings. Their publication in Matter discusses the sustainable extraction process used isolate the nut’s polysaccharides and demonstrates its enhanced performance in biosignal recording and tissue regeneration.

The Vitelli Group designed a compound robot which use principles of odd elasticity and active materials to enable decentralized locomotion across challenging terrains. Their paper in Nature explains how each part exerts nonsymmetric and nonreciprocal forces to create a robust collective machine that senses and responds to its environment.
 

The Delacrétaz group asks, is there a quantum limit to how fast many-body systems can equilibrate? Their publication in Nature Physics shows that large hydrodynamic fluctuations prevent a wide class of systems from regaining thermal equilibrium faster than the "Planckian time scale", set by Planck's constant and the equilibrium temperature.

The Talapin group designed a method of directly synthesizing various III-V quantum dots using a molten inorganic salt environment. Their paper in JACS demonstrates how this thermally-stable, oxygen-free environment enables the formation of highly crystalline InGaP and GaP nanocrystals.

The Murugan group discovered that physical systems can efficiently perform complex computations with contrastive learning. Their paper in Nature Communications shows how simple systems can use integral feedback to solve problems without digital hardware.

The Park group introduced a way to control the spectral response and light polarization of organic crystals just one atom thick. In their Nano Letters article, they synthesize spectrally similar molecular crystals in different 2D lattices in order to tune their optical properties.

Arvind Murugan was awarded the 2025 Tel Aviv University International Prize in Biophysics for his "pivotal contributions to understanding the informatics of various biological processes, and specifically for leveraging molecular complexity of disordered systems for efficient physical computation and learning." The prize awards researchers for originality and excellence in the field of Biophysics.

Both Sarah King and Luca Delacrétaz were awarded 2025 Sloan Research Fellowships, which recognize faculty for their creativity and innovation as well as potential for leadership in their fields.

An Engel group article in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters describes unexpected behavior observed in electrons passing through a conical intersection. They found the final electronic population had drastically different vibrational coherences from those it started with, a first-of-its-kind observation that is  unexplained by the semiclassical theory on conical intersections.

The Scherer group introduced a method of calculating the entropy production rate of overdamped, non-conservative, N-body systems. Their article in Physical Review E uses a novel collective mode decomposition and force field decomposition to show that the rates of entropy production and power dissipation are equal in these systems, in agreement with a theorem by Seifert.