Soft-matter hydrodynamics

The group studies how dilute concentrations of flexible polymers transform the flow of simple liquids, turning Newtonian intuition on its head. Even when inertia is negligible, the stretching of polymer molecules feeds elastic stresses back into the fluid, producing a genuinely chaotic, mixing state known as elastic turbulence at vanishingly small Reynolds number. Through carefully controlled rheometric and microfluidic experiments, the work maps the instabilities, scaling laws, and statistics that govern this purely elastic disorder.

A second thread concerns how deformable objects — polymers, vesicles, capsules, and droplets — respond to shear and to turbulent surroundings, and how their coupling back to the flow reshapes the macroscopic transport of momentum. These questions underlie the long-standing puzzle of turbulent drag reduction, where trace amounts of additives suppress dissipation in pipes and boundary layers. Understanding the underlying mechanics matters for energy-efficient transport, mixing in microscale devices, and the broader physics of complex fluids far from equilibrium.