Related papers: Active Materials: Biological Benchmarks and Transp…
Flows are essential to transport resources over large distances. As soon as diffusion becomes time-limiting, flows are needed. Flows are key for the function of multiple human organs, from the blood vasculature to the lungs, the digestive…
The accumulation of self-propelled particles on repulsive barriers is a widely observed feature in active matter. Despite being implicated in a broad range of biological processes, from biofilm formation to cytoskeletal movement, wetting of…
Transport at microscopic length scales is essential in biological systems and various technologies, including microfluidics. Recent experiments achieved self-organized transport phenomena in microtubule active matter using light to modulate…
Questions of participant understanding of the nature of an activity have been addressed in anthropology and sociolinguistics with the concepts of frames and framing. For example, a student may frame a learning activity as an opportunity for…
Advances in controlling and measuring systems of ultra-cold atoms provided strong motivation to theoretical investigations of quantum dynamics in closed many-body systems. Fundamental questions on quantum dynamics and statistical mechanics…
These are the notes for the 4.5-hour course with the same title that I delivered in August 2025 at the Les Houches summer school ``Exact Solvability and Quantum Information''. In these notes I pedagogically introduce the setting of…
The incredible thermo-mechanical properties of biological materials arise from the microscopic scale due to a complex hierarchical mechanism, regulated by microinstabilities at the molecular level. The description of such complex structures…
While many living biological media combine both viscous and elastic properties, most theoretical studies employ either purely fluid- or solid-like descriptions. We here use a unified framework for active films on substrates capable of…
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
Active fluids refer to the fluids that contain self-propelled particles such as bacteria or micro-algae, whose properties differ fundamentally from the passive fluids. Such particles often exhibit an intermittent motion, with high-motility…
Active systems are inherently out of equilibrium, as they collect energy from their surroundings and transform it into directed motion. A recent theoretical study suggests that binary mixtures of active particles with distinct effective…
Motility is a ubiquitous feature of microbial life on Earth, and is widely regarded as a promising biosignature candidate. In the search for motile organisms, it is therefore valuable to have rough estimates for the number of such microbes…
Active constituents burn fuel to sustain individual motion, giving rise to collective effects that are not seen in systems at thermal equilibrium, such as phase separation with purely repulsive interactions. There is a great potential in…
The analysis of live-cell single-molecule imaging experiments can reveal valuable information about the heterogeneity of transport processes and interactions between cell components. These characteristics are seen as motion changes in the…
Biological systems exhibit large-scale self-organized dynamics and structures which enable organisms to perform the functions of life. The field of active matter strives to develop and understand microscopically-driven nonequilibrium…
Active systems are driven out of equilibrium by exchanging energy and momentum with their environment. This endows them with anomalous mechanical properties that we review in this colloquium for the case of dry scalar active matter, which…
Minimal models of active and driven particles have recently been used to elucidate many properties non-equilibrium systems. However, the relation between energy consumption and changes in the structure and transport properties of these…
Geometric mechanics provides valuable insights into how biological and robotic systems use changes in shape to move by mechanically interacting with their environment. In high-friction environments it provides that the entire interaction is…
A learning path on radioactivity in the last class of high school is presented. An introduction to radioactivity and nuclear phenomenology is followed by measurements of natural radioactivity. Background and weak sources are monitored for…
Communication between cells is realized by exchange of biochemical substances. Due to internal organization of living systems and variability of external parameters, the exchange is heavily influenced by perturbations of various parameters…