The join button will be shown 30 minutes before the seminar starts.
For more than a hundred years, scientists have carefully analysed the apparently random fluctuations in Brownian trajectories to learn about soft systems. In a more general sense, however, the information hidden within experimental fluctuations is typically underexploited, due to challenges in unambiguously linking fluctuation signatures to underlying physical mechanisms. In this talk, I will discuss our recent work developing new approaches to interpreting fluctuations in experimental data from a variety of soft systems, and thereby turn ‘noise’ into signal. In particular, I will share some recent results taking a fresh look at fluctuations in equilibrium colloidal monolayers. Here, we have combined experiment, simulation and theory to explore how simply counting colloids can reveal details of self and collective dynamics in interacting systems [1,2,3]. I will then discuss ongoing work to extend this understanding to confined driven systems [4], with the long-term goal of elucidating characteristic fluctuations in our synthetic nanopore experiments [5].
[1] E. K. R. Mackay, B. Sprinkle, S. Marbach, A. L. Thorneywork, Phys. Rev X. (2024)
[2] A. Carter, ALT et al., Soft Matter, 21, 3991, (2025)
[3] E. K. R. Mackay, ALT et al., arXiv:2512.17476, (2025)
[4] S. F. Knowles, E. K. R. Mackay, A. L. Thorneywork, J. Chem. Phys., (2024)
[5] S. F. Knowles, A. L. Thorneywork et al., Phys. Rev. Lett, 127, 137801, (2021)