Department of Physics

Cellular membranes are critical interfaces for the biochemical interactions that regulate cell behavior and function. Composed of heterogeneous mixtures of lipids and proteins, these membranes create complex environments where protein-lipid interactions are functionally coupled, making mechanistic understanding and experimental control particularly challenging.

Some of the most noticeable changes in the shape of a cell membrane are the formation of finger-like protrusions such as short filopodia (typically <5 μm long) that assist in environmental sensing and cell migration or tunneling nanotubes (TNTs) that connect cells up to 100 μm away for intercellular communication.

For the past two decades harmonically trapped ultracold atomic gases have been used with great success to study fundamental many-body physics in flexible experimental settings. However, the resulting gas density inhomogeneity in those traps has made it challenging to study paradigmatic uniform-system physics (such as critical behavior near phase transitions) or complex quantum dynamics.