Princeton University

Description

BGER - Visits to research groups in the departments of Chemical Engineering, Evolutionary Biology and Mechanical Engineering at Princeton.

The engagement activities involved development of collaborations with experimental groups to refine the current theoretical models of the collective behaviour of active matter. The unifying characteristic of active materials is that they are composed of self-driven units - active particles - each capable of converting stored or ambient free energy into systematic movement. The interaction of active particles with each other and with the medium they live in gives rise to highly correlated collective motion and mechanical stress. Active particles are generally elongated and their direction of self-propulsion is set by their own anisotropy, rather than fixed by an external field. They therefore often self-organise into collective states with orientational order (i.e liquid crystalline phases). The goal is to describe the dynamical behaviour of these states.

Period	15 Jan 2013 → 31 Mar 2013
Visiting	Princeton University