Soft Matter and Complex Systems Seminar

Solving a complex physical problem numerically is like cooking a stew. You throw a lot of ingredients together and the result might be delicious, but it’s often hard to say what part made the difference. By challenging ourselves to think before we compute and reduce a problem to its essential ingredients, we may achieve much greater insight into why a physical system behaves a certain way. In this talk I will look at swimming bacteria and use minimal fluid dynamical models to explain what drives the bundling of their flagellar filaments, why there exists an optimal length for those, and why the shape of the cell matters for its propulsion. If there is time, I will use the same ideas to also explain how a rolling colloid can trap and transport cargo along an interface.

The seminar will be conducted on Zoom
https://zoom.us/j/92987083349?pwd=YTZLSFVWUnJzdE4xS1drR3dqMVFDdz09