Active Soft and Biological Matter, Les Houches 2012

Les Houches, France
This meeting will focus on the physical properties and collective behavior of active soft and biological matter.
These systems are maintained in non-equilibrium states by constant input of energy, and could exist at various scales. They include the behavior of macroscopic assemblies of individuals such as birds in a flock or fish in a colony or at a smaller scale of bacterial colonies, vibrated granular materials, artificial microswimmers, active colloidal objects and various biological systems such as the cytoskeleton in cells and beating cilia in metachrony. Despite their diversity, these systems could all be described by hydrodynamic theories that are only based on the common existing symmetries and the phenomenological transport coefficients. Several general features emerge from these descriptions that seem to be of a very universal nature : pattern formation, wave propagation, and defects, among others.

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