Related papers: WHAT IS LIFE - Sub-cellular Physics of Live Matter
One of the fundamental questions in the field of subatomic physics is what happens to matter at extreme densities and temperatures as may have existed in the first microseconds after the Big Bang and exists, perhaps, in the core of dense…
Chirality, or handedness, is a topic that is common in biology and chemistry, yet is rarely discussed in physics courses. We provide a way of introducing the topic in classical physics, and demonstrate the merits of its inclusion - such as…
These lectures were prepared for the 2014 PCMI graduate summer school and were designed to be a lightweight introduction to statistical mechanics for mathematicians. The applications feature some of the themes of the summer school: sphere…
The education system for students in physics suffers (worldwide) from the absence of a deep course in probability and randomness. This is the real problem for students interested in quantum information theory, quantum optics, and quantum…
This article is based on lecture notes for the Marie Curie Training school "Initial Training on Numerical Methods for Active Matter". It provides an introductory overview of modeling approaches for active matter and is primarily targeted at…
There have been many claims that quantum mechanics plays a key role in the origin and/or operation of biological organisms, beyond merely providing the basis for the shapes and sizes of biological molecules and their chemical affinities.…
This set of lectures covers the very basics of flavor physics and are aimed to be an entry point to the subject. A lot of problems are provided in the hope of making the manuscript a self study guide.
Voltage gated channel proteins cooperate in the transmission of membrane potentials between nerve cells. With the recent progress in atomic-scaled biological chemistry it has now become established that these channel proteins provide highly…
These are the commentaries for a volume of reprints of my selected papers with commentaries that I am preparing for publication by World Scientific. Contents: Preface; (1)Early Years, and Condensed Matter Physics; (2) High Energy Neutrino…
The following is an unedited version of two short articles that are forthcoming in Nature Chemical Engineering. Inspired by Purcell's classic lecture "Life at low Reynolds number", I discuss how scaling arguments, dimensional analysis, and…
These lectures are directed at a level suitable for graduate students in experimental and theoretical High Energy Physics. They are intended to give an introduction to the theory and phenomenology of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) as it is…
The American Physical Society (APS) March Meeting of condensed matter physics has grown to nearly 10,000 participants, comprises 23 individual APS groups, and even warrants its own hashtag (#apsmarch). Here we analyze the text and data from…
Lecture notes in french of the lecture on surface tension given in 2015 and 2016 at the preparation to "Agr\'egation de physique" in the Ecole Normale Sup\'erieure de Lyon
The goal of this introduction to symmetries is to present some general ideas, to outline the fundamental concepts and results of the subject and to situate a bit the following lectures of this school. [These notes represent the write-up of…
What should these lectures be? The subject assigned to us is so broad that many books can be written about it. So, in planning these lectures I had several options. One would be to focus on a narrow subset of topics and to cover them in…
Schr{\"o}dinger noticed in 1952 that a scalar complex wave function can be made real by a gauge transformation. The author showed recently that one real function is also enough to describe matter in the Dirac equation in an arbitrary…
This is a brief digest of my closing lecture at the XXII Rencontres de Blois, Particle Physics and Cosmology. Slides of all the talks referred to may be found at http://confs.obspm.fr/Blois2010.
These lectures will address two questions. Is there a simple variational principle underlying the existence of secondary motifs in the native state of proteins? Is there a general approach which can qualitatively capture the salient…
In this review we summarize theoretical progress in the field of active matter, placing it in the context of recent experiments. Our approach offers a unified framework for the mechanical and statistical properties of living matter:…
Life has a special status, it even has its own science: biology. In many ways, the logic of life seems to differ from that of atoms, molecules, planets, or any other `inanimate object'. However, life is increasingly measured using…