Research overview

The macroscopic response of materials to external stimuli can be explained by microscopic mechanisms at small length scales spanning micrometers and below. Some classical examples are the activity of dislocations during metal plasticity, shear bands and voids during ductile failure, cracks during brittle failure and phase boundaries in shape memory alloys. This multi-scale approach, in general, is applicable to a wide range of open and complex problems spanning the fields of mechanics, materials science, applied physics, biology and mathematics. Hence, modern research in this field is by definition inter-disciplinary.

My research in this field focuses on studying material response under extreme conditions of loading and how the dynamics of micro-scale interfaces control this response. Problems of specific interest are plastic deformation and failure of materials under dynamic loading conditions, thermo-electro-mechanical response of ferroelectric materials and connecting these multi-physical macroscopic phenomena to the kinetics of interfaces (like phase boundaries, deformation twins, ferroelectric domains) in materials. My tools are primarily experimental and theoretical.

Probing material behavior under extreme conditions require the development of advanced measurement techniques not just at the small length-scales but also at time-scales reaching down to the nanosecond. While modern microscopy techniques are pushing the limits of observable length-scales, the measurement of physical phenomena at small length and time-scales simultaneously is still a nascent problem. These techniques are critical to the development of mechanism-based models at extreme loading rates. This is a second focus of my research: to develop advanced measurement tools to probe the multi-scale response of materials at the extremes.

If the above synopsis interested you, I invite you to read more about specific problems that I work on.