Category: conference

Frankfurt in 5 hours…

On my way back to India from Leipzig, I spent an evening in Frankfurt (19th Sept 2025). I arrived on an intercity train from Leipzig to Frankfurt in the late afternoon and had about 22 hours for my flight. I quickly checked into the hotel, did a bit of research online and picked a few places to visit in the evening. As suggested, I took a 1-day train ticket and went to Frankfurt Hauptwache, and visited the following places on foot: Museum of Modern Electronic Music, city center walkway, Iron Bridge, love locks on the bridge, walkway around the bridge, including a beautiful view of the sunset and cruise ship, the historical Römerberg that has statues of Minerva and the goddess of justice.

It was a long walk on a bright evening, and what a few hours of historical learning…pictures below.

ConForce 25 – highlights

From 15th to 18th June 2025, I attended a focused meeting called ConForce.

The location was at an interesting place: Casuarina Resort Park- Kurunji, which is about 70 km from Pune. It was a scenic and raw place, with an amazing landscape. The resort facilities were ok with limited facilities, but the landscape was just breathtaking. It rained almost all the time, but it created a wonderful visual across the horizon with lush green patches of mountains and grey clouds (see image).

The main theme of the meeting was related to force spectroscopy, with a greater tilt towards biophysical applications. I spoke in the optical tweezers section and enjoyed the discussion with various participants and speakers. Specifically, I presented some of our recent, unpublished work on optical binding and its optical perturbation.

OMC 2023

We had a great discussion after the talk… spoke on how temperature gradients can be harnessed for optical manipulation in colloidal fluids… which further leads to some interesting Brownian dynamics

The 10th Optical Manipulation and Structured Materials Conference (OMC2023) was superb….learnt a lot.
This was part of Optics & Photonics International Congress 2023

Thanks to Prof. Takashige Omatsu for the invitation and amazing Japanese hospitality…

Hot Brownian Colloids – talk

On 19th Jan 2023, I gave a ~40 min talk on “Hot Brownian Colloids in Structured Optical Tweezers” in a very interesting conference on Frontiers in Non-Equilibrium Physics (FNEP) held at Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai.

I mainly spoke about emergent Brownian dynamics of laser-heated colloids under optical confinement. Below is the link to the talk.

I concluded my talk quoting P W Anderson’s essay “More is Different“

“The constructionist hypothesis breaks down when confronted with the twin difficulties of scale and complexity.  The behavior of large and complex aggregates of elementary particles, it turns out, is not to be understood in terms of a simple extrapolation of the properties of a few particles.

Instead, at each level of complexity entirely new properties appear, and the understanding of the new behaviors requires research which I think is as fundamental in its nature as any other.”

P.W. Anderson  ‘More is Different’
Science, 177, 4047 (1972)

More is not only different, but also wonderful !

My talk at ICTS

On 1st Dec 2022, I gave a talk on “Structured-Light Scattering : Implications in Momentum Space” as part of a discussion meeting on STRUCTURED LIGHT AND SPIN-ORBIT PHOTONICS held at International Center of Theoretical Sciences, Bangalore.

I mainly spoke about topological light scattering in the frame work of angular momentum of light and absorptive effects in optothermal tweezers created by structured light.

Below is the embedded video link to my talk. The playlist also has many other interesting talks related to the topic.