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Why did we go to the Moon? Why does the Vatican support an astronomical observatory? These questions mask a deeper question: Why do individuals choose to spend their lives in pursuit of pure…
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Br. Guy Consolmagno Date
April 12th, 2018
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We discuss how the non-equilibrium driving forces introduced by the natural biological activity or by
physical self-propulsion mechanisms generically affect the structure, dynamics and phase behavior…
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Ludovic Berthier Date
April 19th, 2018
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We perform a stick-slip experiment to characterize avalanches for granular materials. In our experiment, a
constant speed stage pulls a slider which rests on a vertical bed of circular photoelastic…
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Aghil Abed Zadeh Date
April 20th, 2018
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We are taught to understand solids by considering ideal crystals. This approach becomes untenable as
the amount of disorder increases; for a glass with no well-defined long-range order, a crystal is…
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Sid Nagel Date
April 20th, 2018
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Though the systematic use of topology to understand defects in ordered matter is now nearly 50 years
old, the original work failed to completely characterize systems with broken translational order,…
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Randy Kamien Date
April 18th, 2018
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Symmetry breaking is a ubiquitous phenomenon that occurs spontaneously when a system is subjected
to variations in size and/or perturbations in terms of thermodynamic parameters. As a stochastic…
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Younan Xia Date
April 19th, 2018
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When conventional brittle materials break, long cracks form due to stress focusing at crack tips: a
phenomenon explained by Griffith in the 1920s. In this talk, we will discuss two types of systems…
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Xiaoming Mao Date
April 19th, 2018
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Biological assemblies in nature are seen as active matter due to their ability to perform intelligent
collective motion based on neighbor interactions and sometimes without any centralized control…
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Shankar Lalitha Sridhar Date
April 19th, 2018
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The evolution of multicellularity set the stage for sustained increases in organismal complexity. However,
a fundamental aspect of this transition remains largely unknown: how do simple clusters of…
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Shane Jacobeen Date
April 19th, 2018
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Animal cells in tissues are supported by biopolymer matrices, which exhibit highly nonlinear mechanical
properties. Here we show that this nonlinearity allows living contractile cells to generate a…
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Pierre Ronceray Date
April 19th, 2018
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The aim of this talk is to look at soft random solids through the lens of condensed matter theory, and to explore how their core features -- most notably their random structure and elasticity…
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Paul Goldbart Date
April 18th, 2018
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While the equilibrium properties, states, and phase transitions of interacting systems are well described by statistical mechanics, the lack of suitable state parameters has hindered the…
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Paul Chaikin Date
April 20th, 2018
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Biomolecules can self-assemble into liquid phases, termed ‘membraneless organelles’ in the biological context, though also known as ‘coacervates’. I will discuss our efforts…
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Omar Saleh Date
April 19th, 2018
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Active flocking on curved surfaces, such as the 2-sphere and the catenoid, exhibits dynamical symmetry breaking in the form of spontaneous flow, calculable inhomogeneous density patterns and…
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Mark Bowick Date
April 18th, 2018
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The challenge of separating emulsified oil from oil/water mixture has sparked enormous research interests in developing advanced membrane technology. One of the most crucial elements to achieve high…
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Minxiang (Glenn) Zeng, Eric Zhang, Dali Huang, Dr. Zhengdong Cheng Date
April 20th, 2018
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Structural hierarchy, in which materials possess distinct features on multiple length scales, is ubiquitous in
nature. Many biological materials, such as bone, cellulose, and muscle, have as many as…
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Jonathan Michel Date
April 19th, 2018
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