AkashJain

Active matter refers to many-body systems composed of living or otherwise self-driven agents. Such systems often display exotic collective behaviors, including self-organisation and spontaneous structure formation, that stand in sharp contrast to the behaviour of ordinary passive matter. Active matter typically draws from an external fuel reservoir, such as food, allowing it to locally circumvent the second law of thermodynamics by reducing its own entropy. The global second law, of course, remains intact, with the corresponding entropy increase appearing in the fuel reservoir and the surrounding environment.

In a series of papers with Jay Armas and Ruben Lier, we have developed a new hydrodynamic framework for active matter that consistently incorporates the effects of fuel reservoirs and the environment. This framework allows us to investigate temperature and energy fluctuations in active systems, features that were not accessible in previous hydrodynamic models.

Literature Contributions

Collaborators