Alladi Ramakrishnan Hall

Self-propelled particles as an "Ising Model" for active materials

Aparna Baskaran

Brandeis University

Inherently out of equilibrium soft materials such as the cytoskeleton of a cell or a bacterial colony have come to be referred to as active materials. These systems are driven at the microscale by energy consuming entities (such as molecular motors) that do work or produce autonomous motion. In this talk I will consider a simple model of self propelled particles and describe lessons learnt both in terms of a theoretical framework to understand active materials and as a tool to discover design principles to extract macroscopic work from such systems.