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| Name |
Lubensky, Tom C. |
| Location
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University of Pennsylvania |
| Primary Field
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Applied Physical Sciences |
| Secondary Field
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Physics |
 Election Citation
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Lubensky is a physicist who has made striking advances in understanding ""soft"" materials, such as liquid crystals, membranes, vesicles, and microemulsions. He has creatively applied the theoretical methods of many-body physics to complex fluids and solids. For instance, he has elucidated the properties of the twist-grain-boundary phase in emulsions and lipid phases intercalated with DNA. |
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Research Interests
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I am a theoretical a theoretical condensed-matter physicist. In the past, I have carried out research on phenomenological theories of elasticity and dynamics of materials with broken continuous symmetries, liquid crystals, phase transitions and critical phenomena, percolation and related topics, quasicrystals, colloidal physics, microrheology, elasticity of biological gels, and granular materials and jamming. My current interest center on topological mechanics, which extends the enormously successful characterization of quantum materials in terms of the topological properties of their excitation spectra, to mechanical systems and, most recently, on ""odd-viscosity"" systems. As an example, in collaboration with Charlie Kane, I was able demonstrate that certain types of elastic lattices, which can be created using modern 3D printing, can one face that remains essentially undistorted in response to a point-like force whereas the opposite face undergoes large zero-energy distortions. Odd-viscosity is a phenomenon, first predicted theoretically by Lars Onsager, that occurs in fluid systems in which time-reversal symmetry (TRS) is broken: a new non-dissipative term that looks like viscous response appears in the hydrodynamical equations of the fluid. An active fluid composed of or containing spinning particles breaks TRS and has peculiar flow properties such as unidirectional surface waves. |
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