Thu, 30 Jan 2025

12:00 - 13:00
L3

Spontaneous shape transformations of active surfaces

Alexander Mietke
(Department of Physics)
Further Information

Alexander Mietke is a theoretical physicist working on active and living matter. He frequently collaborates with experimentalists who study processes at the cell, tissue and organism scale to identify minimal physical principles that guide these processes. This often inspires new theoretical work on topics in non-equilibrium soft matter physics, more broadly in the self-organization of mechanical and chemical patterns in active matter, the emergent shape dynamics of membranes and active surfaces, liquid crystals in complex geometries, chirality in active systems, as well as in developing coarse-graining and inference approaches that are directly applicable to experimental data. 

Abstract

Biological matter has the fascinating ability to autonomously generate material deformations via intrinsic active forces, where the latter are often present within effectively two-dimensional structures. The dynamics of such “active surfaces” inevitably entails a complex, self-organized interplay between geometry of a surface and its mechanical interactions with the surrounding. The impact of these factors on the self-organization capacity of surfaces made of an active material, and how related effects are exploited in biological systems, is largely unknown.

In this talk, I will first discuss general numerical challenges in analysing self-organising active surfaces and the bifurcation structure of emergent shape spaces. I will then focus on active surfaces with broken up-down symmetry, of which the eukaryotic cell cortex and epithelial tissues are highly abundant biological examples. In such surfaces, a natural interplay arises between active stresses and surface curvature. We demonstrate that this interplay leads to a comprehensive library of spontaneous shape transformations that resemble stereotypical morphogenetic processes. These include cell-division-like invaginations and the autonomous formation of tubular surfaces of arbitrary length, both of which robustly overcome well-known shape instabilities that would arise in analogue passive systems.

 

 

Tue, 15 Jun 2021
14:30
Virtual

Numerical Relativity

Katy Clough
(Department of Physics)
Abstract

Numerical relativity allows us to simulate the behaviour of regions of space and time where gravity is strong and dynamical. For example, it allows us to calculate precisely the gravitational waveform that should be generated by the merger of two inspiralling black holes. Since the first detection of gravitational waves from such an event in 2015, banks of numerical relativity “templates” have been used to extract further information from noisy data streams. In this talk I will give an overview of the field - what are we simulating, why, and what are the main challenges, past and future.

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A link for this talk will be sent to our mailing list a day or two in advance.  If you are not on the list and wish to be sent a link, please contact @email.

Wed, 29 Jan 2014
10:15
L4

Two exact solutions in the theory of biogenic mixing by microorganisms

Mitya Pushkin
(Department of Physics)
Abstract

Suspensions of active particles, such as swimming microorganisms, turn out to be efficient stirrers of the surrounding fluid. This fact may be directly relevant to the feeding and evolutionary strategies of swimming cells. Microfluidic devices exploring swimmers-induced mixing have been proposed. The possibility of a significant biogenic contribution to the ocean circulation is currently under intense debate. However, understanding fluctuations and the effective tracer diffusion in these non-equilibrium systems remains a challenge.  

In this talk we focus on the fundamentals of these processes.  We discuss the impediments to stirring by force-free microswimmers and give a classification of the possible stirring mechanisms. We show that enhanced mixing may arise due to entrainment of the surrounding fluid by individual swimmers moving on infinite straight trajectories. Our first exact result shows that the total amount of fluid entrained by a swimmer, also know as its Darwin drift, is finite and can be decomposed into a universal and model-dependent parts that have a clear physical meaning.

A different stirring mechanism arises for swimmers having curved trajectories. We show that the previously suggested model of swimmers moving in straight finite runs interspersed with random reorientations can be solved exactly. In particular, we calculate the effective tracer diffusion coefficient for a suspension of dipolar swimmers and show that swimmers confined to a plane give rise to a Levy flight process.

Our results provide a quantitative description of the enhanced tracer mixing in dilute suspensions of microswimmers. They agree with the results of numerical simulations and recent experiments with suspension of E. coli.

Thu, 25 Oct 2012

15:00 - 16:00
L3

SU(3)-Structures in Heterotic Compactifications

Eirik Svanes
(Department of Physics)
Abstract

I will give an introduction to how SU(3)-structures appear in heterotic string theory and string compactifications. I will start by considering the zeroth order SU(3)-holonomy Calabi-Yau scenario, and then see how this generalizes when higher order effects are considered. If time, I will discuss some of my own work.

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