Self-propulsion up close and from far away: swimming E. coli and living liquid crystals
Dr. Tapan Adhyapak (Technische Universität Berlin)

Active or self-propelling objects in suspensions form rich physical systems exhibiting many interesting and surprising collective behaviors. At the individual level too, these objects often show very complex and puzzling properties. In this talk, I shall first discuss about the locomotion of an E. coli, a bacterium widely used as a prototype for a living active particle. I shall present our recent results on how some of the unique dynamical properties of the flagella, the propelling units, affect the complex swimming behavior of the bacterium. In the second part of the talk, I shall discuss how self-propulsion in mesophases formed by a large number of active particles lead to dramatic consequences on the stability, order, fluctuation and the rheological properties of those systems