| Thu November 8th 2018 16:00 – 17:00 ZH286 | Seminar | Soft Active Matter in Complex Environments Giorgio Volpe |
Details:At all scales, active matter systems are groups of entities capable of taking up energy from their environment and converting it into directed motion. Because of this constant flow of energy, their behavior can only be explained and understood within the framework of non-equilibrium physics. In particular, many living active matter systems, such as schools of fish, flocking birds and bacterial colonies, exhibit collective and dynamic behaviors that are not attainable by their counterparts at equilibrium. In this seminar, I will present recent experimental results where we show that the emergence of these behaviors is very sensitive to changes in environmental conditions – environment that is often highly heterogeneous and disordered for realistic natural systems. I will then discuss the implications of these results for the emergence of optimal random searches and bacterial social behaviours in complex environments. | ||
