The first lecture of the Soft Matter and Biophysics chair will be devoted to active matter.
An active system is a system out of thermodynamic equilibrium whose energy is consumed locally by each of its constituents.
The first part of the lecture will discuss theoretical methods for identifying activity and present some biological or synthetic active systems.
The second part of the lecture will show how a hydrodynamic theory of active gels can be systematically constructed, using conservation laws and symmetries, and will qualitatively discuss some experimental results based on this theory.
The third part of the lecture will be devoted to two very general properties of active matter: the appearance of spontaneous flows or collective motions, and the non-equilibrium phase transitions of active matter.