Project title: Theory of active matter

Supervisor: Dr. Gunnar Pruessner & Prof. Henrik Jensen

Project description:

Starting from the ideas of Turing, where he introduces the concepts of reaction-diffusion systems, and later Prigogine, promoting the concepts of irreversible thermodynamics and remarking the importance of fluctuations in the formation of spatial structures (in the context of chemical reactions), physicists and mathematicians have been able describe the emergence of order in systems which are kept out-of-thermodynamic equilibrium ranging from pattern formation in vegetation, to self-organization and cooperative effects in active systems. In the context of active matter, and biological systems, non-equilibrium statistical mechanics approach has allowed the description of population dynamics, long-range correlations, protein folding and DNA dynamics, to name a few.

My objective in this project is to describe active matter through the theory of fluids, where particles-particle interactions and the collisional processes between them are important. This project involves experiments, numeric and analytics.