Centre de Physique Théorique

Agenda

Mercredi 9 janvier 2019

14h00 – 15h30, Amphi 5

Physics of active matter : A personal overview

Hugues Chaté (SPEC, CEA Saclay)

Active matter has come to refer to out-of-equilibrium systems where energy, either gathered from the environment, or stored internally, is spent by some local units to displace themselves or move other objects. Understandably, this includes most living systems from large animal groups to subcellular components, but also collections of man-made objects such as activated colloids and microswimmers.

While numerical approaches have often been at the leading edge of the field, progress has been slow regarding more fundamental theoretical understanding of the collective properties of active matter.

My talk will present a personal overview of this fast-growing part of statistical physics, with an emphasis on the minimal models at play and their continuous descriptions.

Agenda