This week

Active matter consists of systems whose constituents continuously consume energy to drive motion far from equilibrium, giving rise to a rich variety of emergent collective behaviours. In this talk, I will discuss two active systems, one synthetic and one biological, that exhibit striking dynamical phenomena. I will first focus on superwalking droplets, where self-propelled droplets coupled to long-lived surface waves display memory-driven dynamics that can be captured by a Lorenz-like dynamical system, leading to increasingly complex behaviour as memory is increased. I will then discuss recent work on the quantitative modelling of collective cell migration during anterior-posterior patterning in the mouse embryo, where intermittent start-stop motion emerges from the rheology and stress relaxation dynamics of the surrounding tissue.