June 29 – Wednesday – 11 am – Summer Active Matter Seminar series.
Johnson Auditorium. Â Coffee/cookies in the Physics common area before the talk.
Title: Active Fluids : Applying the tools of soft materials theory to
biological systems
Speaker: Professor Aparna Baskaran, Physics Department, Brandeis University
Active fluids are made up of particle units that consume energy from
internal or external sources and dissipate it by moving through the
medium they inhabit. This paradigm unifies such varied systems as
actin-motor mixtures, bacterial swarms and bird flocks. The key
difference of these systems from conventional non equilibrium systems
is that the energy input that drives the system out of equilibrium is
at the level of each unit rather than through a global body force or a
driving at the boundary of the system. In this talk, I will illustrate
the consequences of this microscopic energy input to emergent behavior
by considering three phenomena exhibited by these systems –
rectification, enhanced ordering and exotic pattern formation.
