Chemical Engg. Seminar Series : Prof. Rituparno Mandal

October 9, 2025 -- October 9, 2025

Speaker : Faculty at Raman Research Institute, Bangalore.
Date & Time: 09th Oct. 2025  Thursday at 4 PM.
Venue : Seminar Hall, Chemical Engg.

Dense & Disordered Active Matter

Two of the major outstanding questions in theoretical physics are: how to describe (a) driven or active systems which are far from equilibrium and (b) disordered systems, typically characterized by glassy relaxation. I will talk about two canonical examples of such dense active matter — systems that reside at the intersection of these two challenging domains. In the first example, which is a dense amorphous assembly of soft self propelled particles, at the large persistence time limit, we observe exciting non-equilibrium signatures such as intermittency, active turbulence etc. In the second example, I will describe an odd solid composed of spinning particles and show that pairwise transverse interactions can lead to distinct phenomenology ranging from self-healing dynamics of grain boundaries and chiral plastic vortices, to force-chains deflection in amorphous packings.