Active matter: a personal overview and some perspectives（东吴物理大讲坛）

报告题目：Active matter: a personal overview and some perspectives

报告人：Hugues Chaté 教授

报告时间：2023年5月26日（周五）下午14：00

报告地点：物理科技楼409

报告摘要：Active matter incorporates constituents that transform energy, stored internally or gathered from their environment, into mechanical work. I will first describe a few spectacular real-life examples of such systems, and then try to draw, from my personal perspective, a panorama of this still fast-growing multi-form field.

I will then focus on the archetypical problem of ‘polar flocks’, which, one may argue, started the field with the publication in 1995 in PRL of the seminal papers by Vicsek et al. and by Toner and Tu. I will describe our current understanding of the emergence of true long-range orientational order from the breaking of a continuous symmetry in 2D active systems, but I will then show that this landmark result of active matter studies is in fact in jeopardy: recent evidence show that these ordered phases are fragile and often metastable.

If time allows, I will discuss some possible exciting directions for the near future.

报告人简介：Hugues Chaté is a Research Director at CEA-Saclay, France, and the Lead Editor of Physical Review Letters.

He obtained is PhD in 1989 from Université Pierre & Marie Curie in Paris. After a short postdoctoral stay at Bell Laboratories, he joined the condensed matter physics department in Saclay. He was the leader of the Advanced Study Group “Statistical Physics of Collective Motion” at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, and a laureate of the 1000 Talents program of the Chinese government. In 2016, he took a Chair Professor position at the Beijing Computational Science Research Center.

HC’s research covers a wide range of topics ranging from nonlinear dynamics to statistical physics and critical phenomena. He has played a seminal role in the development of the field of active matter, with key papers published on minimal models and their theoretical understanding as well as works in collaborations with leading experimentalists working on animal collective behavior, bacteria colonies, and in vitro mixtures of biofilaments and motor proteins.

HC has written over 170 scientific papers, with about a third published in Physical Review Letters, which have now been cited more than 10000 times for an h-index of 58, according to Web of Science.