anagha nanosystems

Three or four pages of theory, copied into a lab manual the night before. Wire up the breadboard or potentiometer exactly as the manual showed. Note the readings. Plug them into a formula. That was my introduction to "experimental" physics as an undergraduate. I didn't know experiments could look like anything else.

I'd joined Mercy College, Palakkad, for a BSc in Physics a few months before the COVID lockdowns began. I chose physics for a simple reason: it made sense to me. Chemistry didn't click the same way. Biology, which I liked, had been reduced at the school level to memorising scientific names of plants and animals. Physics was the one subject where I could follow the logic all the way through, and the marks followed.

Two of my three years were spent online, from home. In-person lectures on classical mechanics were already dull; the online versions were worse. But I didn't mind it. I could move at my own pace and spend time on what interested me, instead of keeping up with a room full of people. I did well. Research wasn't part of my thinking yet.

When in-person classes resumed, that lab routine became a fixture, and there was no room in it for creativity, for thinking of another way to get the same result. What was in the manual was correct, and following it was enough to be a good student.

By the end of my bachelor's, I realised something: I had a physics degree and no real idea how research in physics actually worked. I hadn't read a paper, didn't know what Google Scholar was, hadn't gained any research experience at all, probably because I'd never gone looking for it either. That gap was exactly what I wanted to fill, and VIT, with its active research labs, felt like the right place to do it.

Still carrying my undergrad impression of labs as tedious, I gravitated towards simulation work at VIT. No equipment, no fixed instructions, just a screen with some powerful buttons, and more time for coursework. Some of it was laziness, if I'm honest. I'd chosen simulations, in part, to avoid ever having to do experimental work again. But it led somewhere real: my project partner and I contributed to research that was eventually published. That was the first time research felt like mine, not just an exercise.

The project sat in plasmonics, a term I hadn't come across the way I had "nanomaterials" or "photonics." What drew me in was learning that plasmonics deals with how light interacts with the free electrons on a metal's surface, and that this interaction shows up in real diagnostic tools. The line that appears on a rapid antigen test, the kind most of us used during COVID, gets its colour from exactly this: gold nanoparticles responding to light. The same physics is being explored for cancer treatment, where light-activated nanoparticles heat up precisely enough to target tumour cells without harming the tissue around them. That a subject this abstract could lead somewhere this concrete changed how I thought about physics itself.

I was settled enough into simulation work that switching to experiments never crossed my mind, until my supervisor left, and I had to look elsewhere. It's strange, looking back: the choice I'd made specifically to stay away from a lab bench is exactly what put me in a position to have no lab bench, and no choice left but to find one.

That's how I found IIT Bombay for my Master's thesis. The project description mentioned a biological angle, and the idea that I could bring physics into biology (despite having no real expertise in either, at that point) was enough to make me curious. I was still hesitant about the experimental part. I was asked a good question around then: how would I know if experimental work wasn't for me if I never tried it? That stuck.

Since January 2024, I've been doing experimental work in soft matter and nanomaterials. The breadboard is long behind me. So is the manual that once told me exactly what to expect. I'd spent years trying to avoid exactly this. And it turns out the thing I was avoiding was the thing I needed.