Winter Conference

Active Matter in Complex Environments

January 1–6, 2023

Conference Website

Organizers:

*Paulo Arratia, University of Pennsylvania
Moumita Das,
Rochester Institute of Technology
Sujit Datta,
Princeton University
Cynthia Reichhardt, LANL

… not your typical active matter conference.

Active matter is a prominent area of research in soft matter and biological physics: it gives us the opportunity to learn new physics (active materials are out of equilibrium), engineer new materials (e.g., “intelligent” responsive materials), and understand more about biology (e.g., cells, migratory animals, and even subcellular motor proteins are active materials). While a tremendous amount of work has focused on the physics of active matter in bulk/unconfined environments, recent work is starting to demonstrate the rich physics associated with active matter in complex environments characterized by tortuosity, confinement, and complex interactions. In these cases, environmental interactions can strongly impact motility behaviors and collective phenomena like flocking, clustering, and phase separation. This Aspen Winter Conference will focus on this new direction in active matter research at the interface of soft matter physics, statistical and nonlinear physics, biology, and engineering. On the experimental side, recent advances have enabled direct visualization and characterization of active matter behavior in models of complex biological, natural, and engineering environments. These advances are motivating the development of new theories and methods that can harness the output of these new tools. On the theoretical and computational side, recent advances have enabled more efficient computation of active matter behavior in complex environments over a wide variety of length and time scales. These models are now finding use in the diverse settings described above. Due to these recent advances, an explosion of work is ongoing in this topic.

This Conference will bring together a diverse group of leading theorists and experimentalists working on such problems across this rapidly developing field, in a wide range of systems and over a wide range of scales. Our ultimate goal is to foster new collaborations, clarify unifying/open questions for future research to address, and brainstorm new directions for the field that cut across physics, biology, materials, engineering, and other disciplines. We will focus on five different themes:
  • Fundamentals of active matter in complex environments,
  • Collective behaviors,
  • Interactions with complex fluids,
  • Active matter through the lens of Biology and vice versa
  • Synthetic active materials and assemblies

For more information, please click here.

*organizer responsible for participant diversity