Venue: Berry Lecture Theatre, HH Wills Physics Labs Building, Tyndall Ave, 3pm

We would like to invite you to attend the Physics Colloquium, which will be held on Monday from 3:00PM - 4:00PM in the Mott Lecture Theatre. The colloquia will be followed by tea and coffee in the staff coffee room. We hope to see you there!

The most imminent event in the series, on the 22nd May, will be hosted by Julia M Yeomans (The Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics, Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford, UK). Click here for a PDF of the abstract: Colloquium Poster 22nd May 2023 (PDF, 585kB)

For the full list of upcoming colloquia, visit this article.

Abstract:

Active materials such as bacteria, molecular motors and self-propelled colloids are Nature’s engines. They extract energy from their surroundings at a single particle level and use this to do work. Active matter is becoming an increasingly popular area of research because it provides a testing ground for the ideas of non-equilibrium statistical physics, because of its relevance to the collective behaviour of living creatures, from cells to starlings, and because of its potential in designing nanomachines. Dense active matter shows mesoscale turbulence, the emergence of chaotic flow structures characterised by high vorticity and self-propelled topological defects. I will discuss the physics of defects in active materials and describe examples where the concepts of active matter are being used to describe cell motility and morphogenesis.