Active Matter and Nonequilibrium Statistical Physics Lecture Notes of the Les Houches Summer School: Volume 112, September 2018

From molecular motors to bacteria, from crawling cells to large animals, active entities are found at all scales in the biological world. Active matter encompasses systems whose individual constituents irreversibly dissipate energy to exert self-propelling forces on their environment. Over the past twenty years, scientists have managed to engineer synthetic active particles in the lab, paving the way towards smart active materials. This book gathers a pedagogical set of lecture notes that cover topics in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics and active matter. These lecture notes stem from the first summer school on Active Matter delivered at the Les Houches school of Physics. The lectures covered four main research directions: collective behaviours in active-matter systems, passive and active colloidal systems, biophysics and active matter, and nonequilibrium statistical physics—from passive to active.

1 - Dry, aligning, dilute, active matter: A synthetic and self-contained overview
2 - Why walking is easier than pointing: Hydrodynamics of dry active matter
3 - Collective Motion in Active Materials: Model Experiments
4 - Features of interfaced and confined experimental active nematics
5 - Phases of planar active matter
6 - Active Field Theories
7 - "Active brownian particles with programmable interaction rules"
8 - Phoretic Active Matter
9 - Nanotribology of Commensurate and Incommensurate Colloidal Monolayers on Periodic Surfaces
10 - Tissues as active materials
11 - Self-organisation of protein patterns
12 - Active materials: Biological benchmarks and transport limitations
13 - Modelling the microscopic origins of active transport
14 - Fluctuation Induced Forces in and out of Equilibrium
15 - Active glassy materials
16 - Forces in dry active matter
17 - Rheology of complex and active fluids

Julien Tailleur is a statistical physicist working at CNRS and Université de Paris. He has worked on a broad range of problems in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics and its applications to biophysics and active matter. Gerhard Gompper is Professor of Physics at University of Cologne and Institute Director at Forschungszentrum Jülich. He was educated at Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, where he also earned his PhD. Cristina Marchetti is Professor of Physics at the University of California Santa Barbara. She was educated in Italy at the University of Pavia, earned her Ph.D. in the U.S. at the University of Florida, and joined the faculty at UC Santa Barbara in 2018. Julia Yeomans is Professor of Physics and Head of the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics at the University of Oxford and Pauline Chan Fellow at St Hilda's College Oxford. Christophe Salomon is Directeur de Recherches au CNRS, Laboratoire Kastler Brossel, ENS Paris.