Welcome to the Cebe Research Group Website!

Cebe Research Group as of February 2019: From left to right: (Back row) Nelaka Govinna, Eduardo Barrera, Andrew Clark, Ben Zager, Jonathan Minoff, Garrett Schneider (Front row) Ashwin Swar, Miriam Salcedo, Professor Peggy Cebe, Isadora “Izzy” Shamah, Emily DeWolf. Photo credit Mathew Giso.

The Cebe Research Group is a condensed matter physics lab at Tufts University that is interested in the properties of polymeric materials.  A polymer is a molecule comprised of individual repeating molecules or atoms called monomers that are linked together to form a long molecular chain. Polymeric materials have many applications from medical devices, to aerospace material design, and even in everyday commercial plastic products. From a fundamental perspective polymers are an incredible material as they can acquire long range molecular order and form crystals, or remain solid with no long range order and form an amorphous glass, or even have a combination of both phases. The overall material properties of a polymeric material are highly dependent on these specific molecular orderings, so understanding how and why these phases form is crucial to our understanding of these materials. To that end our group seeks to study polymeric materials by using techniques that elucidate the structures and phase transitions of these materials.