Applied/ACMS/absS21

ACMS Abstracts: Spring 2021

Christina Kurzthaler (Princeton)

Complex Transport Phenomena

Abstract: Self-propelled agents are intrinsically out of equilibrium and exhibit a variety of unusual transport features. In this talk, I will discuss the spatiotemporal dynamics of catalytic Janus colloids characterized in terms of the intermediate scattering function. Our findings show quantitative agreement of our analytic theory for the active Brownian particle model with experimental observations from the smallest length scales, where translational diffusion and self-propulsion dominate, up to the larges ones, which probe the rotational diffusion of the active agents. In the second part of this talk, I will address the hydrodynamic interactions between sedimenting particles and surfaces with corrugated topographies, omnipresent in biological and microfluidic environments. I will present an analytic theory for the roughness-induced mobility and discuss the sedimentation behavior of a sphere next to periodic and randomly structured surfaces.

Antoine Remond-Tiedrez (UW)

Instability of an Anisotropic Micropolar Fluid

Abstract: Many aerosols and suspensions, or more broadly fluids containing a non-trivial structure at a microscopic scale, can be described by the theory of micropolar fluids. The resulting equations couple the Navier-Stokes equations which describe the macroscopic motion of the fluid to evolution equations for the angular momentum and the moment of inertia associated with the microcopic structure. In this talk we will discuss the case of viscous incompressible three-dimensional micropolar fluids. We will discuss how, when subject to a fixed torque acting at the microscopic scale, the nonlinear stability of the unique equilibrium of this system depends on the shape of the microstructure.

Hugo Touchette (Stellenbosch University)

Large deviation theory: From physics to mathematics and back

Abstract: I will give a basic overview of the theory of large deviations, developed by Varadhan (Abel Prize 2007) in the 1970s, and of its applications in statistical physics. In the first part of the talk, I will discuss the basics of this theory and its historical sources, which can be traced back in mathematics to Cramer (1938) and Sanov (1960) and, on the physics side, to Einstein (1910) and Boltzmann (1877). In the second part, I will show how the theory can be applied to study equilibrium and nonequilibrium systems and to express many key concepts of statistical physics in a clear mathematical way.