Travel: CECAM Flagship Workshop

Active matter refers to collectives of self-propelled units, e.g., birds, fish, humans, bacteria, drones. The units tend to self-organize in various structures, without any external guidance. For example, birds flock and bacteria swarm.

The agility and versatility of active matter (as seen in the starling murmuration) is inspiring scientists and engineers to develop materials mimicking these properties. This workshop will discuss the latest advances in this rapidly evolving field. This award will provide travel support for US researchers to attend the workshop in CECAM, Switzerland, in March 2023.

Up to 5 US participants will be supported through this award, some of whom would not otherwise be able to attend.

Active matter a rapidly evolving area of research. Chirality is an intrinsic fundamental property of many natural and artificial active systems. Understanding the role of chirality in dynamics of interacting many-body systems is a major challenge.

There has been a surge of interest in collective phenomena that arise when chirality comes into play in both biological and artificial systems. Developing an understanding of the complex dynamics in chiral systems driven out-of-equilibrium by external fields represents a significant theoretical and computational challenge. The workshop would help to assess recent developments and outstanding challenges in understanding of active chiral systems.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.