2025-11-23 - 2025-11-27
Falko Ziebert
University of Heidelberg
On the microscale, biology is full of objects that move by themselves, like swimming bacteria, crawling cells, gliding microorganisms and even some viruses (which are not even alive) have recently been shown to do so. In contrast to classical physics, where particles move e.g. due to finite temperature and/or subject to external forces/fields, these biological objects use internal or external energy uses to maintain nonequilibrium states that allow them to „self-propel“. As a consequence, the collective behavior is also very different from, e.g. a gas or liquid, allowing for motility-induced phase separation and collective motion in flocks or swirls. Such systems have been termed „active (soft) matter“.
In this lecture series I will introduce examples, both from biology and artificially (i.e. physico-chemically) ones, highlight the novel properties and introduce the concepts to understand actively moving systems. The physical concepts involved comprise hydrodynamics and soft matter, stochastic dynamics, nonequilibrium physics, nonlinear dynamics, continuum modeling and simulations.
