Selected Publications

►Lossless Brownian Information Engine 
    Physical Review Letters (2018) 120, 020601 

►Nonequilibrium Fluctuations for a single-particle analog of gas in a soft wall  
    Physical Review Letters (2015) 114, 060603
► Breathing, crawling, budding, and splitting of a liquid droplet under laser heatings
    Soft Matter (2014) 10, 2679-2684
► Electrical power generation by mechanically modulating electrical double layers
    Nature Communications (2013) (doi:10.1038/ncomms2485)
► Diffusing-wave spectroscopy study of microscopic dynamics of three-dimensional granular systems
    Soft Matter (2010) 6, 2894-2900
► Thermochemical control of oil droplet motion on a solid substrate
     Applied Physics Letters (2008) 93, 084102
► Dynamics of prey-flock escaping behavior in response to predator’s attack
    Journal of Theoretical Biology (2006) 240, 250-259
► Coarsening Dynamics of Striped Patterns in Thin Granular Layers under Vertical Vibration
     Physical Review Letters (2002) 88, 204303
► Capillary Force on Colloidal Particles in Freely Suspended Liquid Thin Film
     Physical Review Letters (2001) 86, 4326-4329
► Jamming of Granular Flow in a Two-Dimensional Hopper
     Physical Review Letters (2001) 86, 71-74
► Influence of Hydrodynamic flow on Nucleated Wetting
     Journal of Chemical Physics  (1997) 106, 301-310
► 2-D Imaging Ellipsometric Microscope
     Review of Scientific Instruments (1995) 66, 4972-4976
► Effects of Ambient Gases on Granular Materials under Vertical Vibration
      Physical Review Letters (1995) 74, 4643-4646
► Bubbling in vertically vibrated granular materials
      Nature (1994) 371, 231-233
► Surface Waves in Vertically Vibrated Granular Materials
     Physical Review Letters (1993) 71, 1832-1835
► Measuring the Probability Distribution of the Relative Velocities in Grid-Generated Turbulence
     Physical Review Letters (1992) 68, 938-942

Liquid-solid/liquid/soft matter interfaces
Any piece of matter in nature is bounded by a surface or interface. We study the dynamical phenomena near the interfaces between liquid and solid (or liquid, soft matter) in following aspects.
(1) Understanding the principles and developing the devices of a micro power generator using the liquid droplet under oscillation
(2) Understanding the charge distribution near the interfaces
(3) Understanding the dynamics of micro particles near the interfaces
(4) Measuring the biological membrane potential using the complex of quantum dots and soft matter



Nonequilibrium fluctuations
Most systems in nature are far from equilibrium. According to the second law of thermodynamics, the entropy of an isolated system should tend to increase until it reaches equilibrium. But according to recent studies about the nonequilibrium fluctuations, the second law is only a statistical one, and there is always nonzero possibility that the entropy of an isolated system might spontaneously decrease. As the size of the systems in interest becomes small, this unusual property becomes apparent.
Currently we are studying the motion of a colloidal particles in an optical trap with a time-varying stiffness. This system can be compared with a heat engine which usually uses a piston to compress and decompress a macroscopic gas, for which temperature, volume and pressure are all well-defined. But our system is one particle gas driven out of equilibrium and the volume where the particle moves around id determined by the optical harmonic potential generated from an external laser light.