53rd Heidelberg Physics Graduate Days

THE STATISTICAL PHYSICS OF COLLECTIVE MOTION: EMERGENCE AND UNIVERSALITY IN ACTIVE MATTER

Benoît Mahault

Active matter refers to assemblies of elementary units whose dynamics break time-reversal symmetry, resulting in the emergence of intriguing self-organizing behaviours that often challenge our intuition based on equilibrium physics. A striking example is the emergence of coordinated motion in systems as diverse as animal groups, bacterial colonies and synthetic active colloids. This ubiquity across a vast range of systems and scales in particular hints at a form of nonequilibrium universality. 

 In this lecture series, we will delve into the statistical physics of active matter, focusing on the study of collective motion. We will explore the modelling and analytical tools used to identify the underlying universality, and how to characterize it experimentally. In addition, we will extend the approach to describe active systems presenting different symmetries, thus revealing different classes of universality, and examine the robustness of collective motion to the presence of spatial disorder.