Ph.D. alum's cutting-edge research
is featured in Nature magazine

Nature magazine published an article in December describing research by Animangsu Ghatak, who earned his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Lehigh last year and is now a faculty member in the department of applied mathematics and theoretical physics at Cambridge University in England.

The article, titled "Stick and slip leads to jagged edges, show ripping experiments," was based on a Nov. 21 article written by Ghatak and his Cambridge colleague, Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, for Physical Review Letters.

Ghatak, who studied with Manoj Chaudhury, professor of chemical engineering, and Mahadevan used rigid rods of varying thicknesses to rip open plastic sheeting. They discovered that rods less than a certain thickness produced tears that were straight and smooth, while rods greater than that thickness produced tears with wavy edges and evenly spaced serrations, or cycloids.

"The repeating cycloid shape is the result of a two-stage tearing process that occurs again and again, say Ghatak and Mahedevan," said the article. "First, the sheet breaks in a crack that surges directly ahead of the rod. This crack quickly runs out of steam, and the rod catches up. Then, as it costs energy for the sheet to bend, the rip veers off at right angles to the motion of the rod through the material."

While at Lehigh, Ghatak won the Peebles Award for Graduate Student Research in Adhesion Science from the Adhesion Society at the Second World Congress of Adhesion in Orlando, Fla., in 2001. He later received the Society's Alan Gent Best Student Paper Award.