Steering self-organisation through confinement
Abstract
Self-organisation is the spontaneous emergence of spatio-temporal structures and patterns from the interaction of smaller individual units. Examples are found across many scales in very different systems and scientific disciplines, from physics, materials science and robotics to biology, geophysics and astronomy. Recent research has highlighted how self-organisation can be both mediated and controlled by confinement. Confinement occurs through interactions with boundaries, and can function as either a catalyst or inhibitor of self-organisation. It can then become a means to actively steer the emergence or suppression of collective phenomena in space and time. Here, to provide a common framework for future research, we examine the role of confinement in self-organisation and identify overarching scientific challenges across disciplines that need to be addressed to harness its full scientific and technological potential. This framework will not only accelerate the generation of a common deeper understanding of self-organisation but also trigger the development of innovative strategies to steer it through confinement, with impact, e.g., on the design of smarter materials, tissue engineering for biomedicine and crowd management.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2204.10059,
title = {Steering self-organisation through confinement},
author = {Nuno A. M. Araújo and Liesbeth M. C. Janssen and Thomas Barois and Guido Boffetta and Itai Cohen and Alessandro Corbetta and Olivier Dauchot and Marjolein Dijkstra and William M. Durham and Audrey Dussutour and Simon Garnier and Hanneke Gelderblom and Ramin Golestanian and Lucio Isa and Gijsje H. Koenderink and Hartmut Löwen and Ralf Metzler and Marco Polin and C. Patrick Royall and Anđela Šarić and Anupam Sengupta and Cécile Sykes and Vito Trianni and Idan Tuval and Nicolas Vogel and Julia M. Yeomans and Iker Zuriguel and Alvaro Marin and Giorgio Volpe},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.10059},
year = {2026}
}