Research

Publications & Projects

My research spans active matter physics, biophysics, and statistical mechanics—exploring how materials can exhibit intelligent behavior.

Focus Areas

Research Interests

Active Matter

Intelligent Robotic Swarms

Scaling up our in-house robotic active matter system to hundreds of robots, incorporating memory and environmental sensing capabilities. Ultimately I want to help bridge the gap between traditional active matter studies and intelligent robotic materials that can process information about their environment.

Robotics Collective Behavior Sensing

Biophysics

Plant Defense Mechanics

Investigating the biomechanics of glandular trichome rupture in tomato plants—an ultra-fast and sensitive defense mechanism against insects. This work combines high-speed imaging, rheology, and theoretical modeling.

Biomechanics Rheology Plant Physics

Statistical Physics

Information Dynamics in (Active) Glasses

Understanding information dynamics in the yielding transition of shear-driven amorphous solids (see my Master's thesis from UBC). Studying cage-breaking phenomena and how information propagates through active disordered systems.

Glassy Dynamics Information Theory Amorphous Solids

Ultracold Physics

Few-Body Physics

Previous work at JILA and CU Boulder on precision measurements of ultracold potassium atoms near Feshbach resonances and deviations from "universal" behavior predicted by few-body physics theory. In particular we studied the properties of Feshbach molecules and three-body recombination.

Ultracold Atoms Feshbach Resonances AMO Physics

Simulation

Cage-breaking model for active matter

Three active particles (active Ornstein-Uhlenbeck dynamics) in circular confinement

Active Ornstein-Uhlenbeck particle dynamics simulation

Simulation showing three confined active particles exhibiting cage-breaking behavior, defined as when the particles rearrange their positions with respect to their neighbors. The persistence time τp = 1 determines the correlation time of the self-propulsion force.

Publications

Selected Works

Journal of Experimental Botany (2025)

Glandular trichome rupture in tomato plants is an ultra-fast and sensitive defense mechanism against insects

J Popowski, L Warma, A Abarca Cifuentes, P Bleeker, M Jalaal

DOI New Scientist YouTube

Physical Review Letters, 123(23), 233402 (2019)

Precision test of the limits to universality in few-body physics

R Chapurin, X Xie, MJ Van de Graaff, JS Popowski, JP D'Incao, PS Julienne, J Ye, EA Cornell

DOI

University of British Columbia (MSc Thesis) (2023)

Information dynamics in the yielding transition of amorphous solids

J Popowski

UBC Library
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Gallery

Research Imagery

Tomato glandular trichomes across scales

Glandular trichomes on tomato plants, from macroscopic to microscopic scales

Cage breaking dynamics schematic

Schematic of cage-breaking dynamics in confined active particles