Pietro Cicuta (Cambridge University) is visiting the lab on Wednesday 07 November, and giving the AMOPP/BioP seminar. Pietro works on a variety of problems relevant to soft matter and biological physics, including colloidal systems, complex fluids and membranes. His talk is titled Emergence of collective states in active colloids, and the abstract is below:
Title: Emergence of collective states in active colloids. Pietro Cicuta (Cambridge University)
Abstract: Coupled oscillators can, under some conditions, synchronise. There are examples of this everywhere in natural phenomena, technology, and material properties. A relatively unexplored area is the synchronisation of colloidal oscillators: these are micron-sized objects, coupled through hydrodynamic interaction. There is reason to study these because physiologically similar structures are thought to enable fluid transport in various organs; technologically it might be possible to construct very sensitive micro-resonators.
Over the last few years we have worked in this area by developing an experimental platform: optical tweezers are used to create phase oscillators. This talk will present various strategies for making oscillators (active colloids), and the resulting collective behaviour of two or more of these elements.
