EventDetails

Speaker:
Prof. Dr. Thomas Speck, Universität Mainz

Active matter has emerged as an umbrella term to describe a wide range of collective
phenomena and systems at the interface of biology, physics, and chemistry that share
a few basic characteristics: they are driven, dominated by fluctuations, and motion is
directed and self-organized. Examples range from flocks of birds to bacterial
suspensions and self-propelled colloidal particles. In contrast to systems driven by
external fields and gradients, which break symmetry globally, active matter constantly
dissipates heat by converting local free energy into directed motion. I will give an
introduction to the field of active matter through presenting selected examples. I will
then focus on active Brownian particles, a model system that combines directed
motion with volume exclusion to sketch how established methods from statistical
physics can be used to describe and eventually understand active matter.