dr. Szymon Starzonek

I am a physicist working at the intersection of soft condensed matter, statistical physics, and biophysics. My research is guided by one of the deepest open problems in physics — the glass transition — and by a broader question that runs through all of my work: how far do the concepts of equilibrium physics extend to systems that are disordered, driven, or far from equilibrium? To explore this, I rely on a common conceptual toolkit — thermodynamic scaling, effective temperature, critical and pretransitional phenomena, and the physics of topological order — that lets me move between very different materials while asking the same fundamental questions.

Much of my earlier work centered on glassy functional materials studied under high pressure. I investigated vitreous olivine-based cathode materials (Li–Fe phosphates), where high-pressure forming enhanced electrical conductivity by up to two orders of magnitude while increasing stiffness, alongside plastic-crystal electrolytes and pressure-stabilized δ-Bi₂O₃ for energy conversion. In parallel, I studied composites and other soft-matter glass formers — systems still surprisingly poorly characterized under pressure, yet offering rare model cases, including the unusual regime in which the glass-transition temperature decreases with pressure (dT_g/dP < 0) — probed with nonlinear dielectric spectroscopy.

A recurring thread across this work is the physics of liquid crystals, which I treat as a bridge between the language of glasses and that of ordered, active matter. Nematics with controlled disorder and their pretransitional fluctuations sit at the heart of much of my thinking.

My current flagship project, Active Glasses (funded by the National Science Centre, Poland), extends these ideas into non-equilibrium physics. It develops a theory of dense, space-filling active matter — confluent systems such as epithelial tissues — in which the transition between solid-like and fluid-like states is set not by density, but by cell shape, motility, and topological defects. Using large-scale simulations of the Active Vertex Model together with tools from liquid-crystal physics and the statistical mechanics of disorder, the project asks whether this fluidization defines a new class of non-equilibrium critical phenomena.

More recently, I have begun investigating how ionizing radiation affects liquid crystals — both as a route to new radiation-sensing concepts and with potential applications in dosimetry and electronics. This direction unites my long-standing interest in liquid-crystalline order with the experimental setting of medical physics and biophysics, pointing toward liquid crystals as functional materials for measuring and managing radiation.

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CURRENT GRANTS

Grant no. 2025/59/D/ST3/03546