Theory Group Lunchtime Seminars
Scheduled seminars are listed below.
Announcements and reminders will be posted to the physics-theory-group-seminar list.
To join this list:
- Sign into your university email account via webmail.
- Click the settings icon along the top icon bar (looks like a cog/gear).
- In the "Search Outlook settings" box type "distribution groups" and click the top search result.
- Under "Distribution groups I belong to" click the icon with two little people and a "+" sign.
- Search for physics-theory-group-seminar and double click on the result.
- Click "join". You will then be added to the email list once approved by a moderator.
To leave this list:
- Sign into your university email account via webmail.
- Click the settings icon along the top icon bar (looks like a cog/gear).
- In the "Search Outlook settings" box type "distribution groups" and click the top search result.
- Under "Distribution groups I belong to" click
physics-theory-group-seminar. - Click the "leave" icon above the list (looks like two people with a minus sign to their bottom right).
[If you are a member of Theory group, you will receive seminar announcements via physics-theory or physics-theory-staff. You do NOT need to subscribe to the above mailing list as well.]
Chiu Fan Lee (Imperial), Universality in active fluids
Active matter is an extreme kind of non-equilibrium system in that detailed balance is broken at the microscopic scale. A typical active system can be a collection of particles that continuously exert mechanical forces on their surrounding environment, and systems of interacting active particles exhibit diverse emergent behaviours. But how do we tell whether the behaviours observed are novel to physics? One way to do so is to determine whether the emergent phenomena are described by novel universal classes. This is the approach I will take in this talk. Specifically, I will start by deriving the hydrodynamic equations of motion for active fluids from symmetry consideration, and then discuss the associated universal behaviours at criticality and in the ordered phase. I will show that some of these universal behaviours can be mapped onto existing equilibrium models, while others are novel or potentially novel to non-equilibrium physics.