Dr Vijay Narayan

I am a Herchel Smith Research Fellow working in the Semiconductor Physics group, Cavendish Laboratory. I am interested in many-body effects in low-density 2DEGs and study a variety of properties including thermopower, thermal conductivity and magnetic susceptibility of 2DEGS to understand the phase behaviour of strongly-interacting electrons. I am also a Fellow at Wolfson College. Prior to my Herchel Smith Fellowship, I was a UKIERI (UK-India Education and Research Initiative) Fellow working on a collaborative project between the Low-Temperature Nano-Electronics Group, Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Science and the Semiconductor Physics Group, Cavendish Laboratory.

I received my PhD in 2009 from the Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Science where I studied the non-equilibrium phase behaviour of agitated granular rods in a quasi-2D geometry. I analysed the collective behaviour of the rods in light of theories of flocking and revealed that the number-density fluctuations of the rods were consistent with those predicted to occur in active nematics.