Condensed and Living Matter Seminars

Upcoming Condensed and Living Matter Seminars



Condensed and Living Matter Seminar: Of the Surface of Things: Ice, Drops, Bubbles, Singularities

Saurabh Nath (MIT)
- David Rittenhouse Laboratory, TBD

Place a drop of water on an icy surface—it crystallizes at the point of contact, and a slow ice front steadily grows upwards. Place a bubble instead, and a burst of ice crystals erupts across its interface, far from…



Condensed and Living Matter Seminar: Cellular collective behavior in spatially complex environments

Emily Hager (Boston University)
- David Rittenhouse Laboratory, A8

Collective behaviors are processes in which large-scale patterns arise from fundamentally local interactions among individuals; in biological systems, these can be organisms, cells, or molecules. A critical open…



Condensed and Living Matter Seminar: Living systems in crowded spaces: from microbial communities to biomolecular condensates

Alejandro Martinez-Calvo (Princeton)
- David Rittenhouse Laboratory, TBD

Spatial organization in living systems is crucial for their functioning and is typically achieved in complex environments––from molecular processes in the crowded cytoplasm to microbial collectives growing in…



Condensed and Living Matter Seminar: Understanding spontaneous assembly in biology: How self-assembly and phase separation work together to build biological structures.

LaNell Williams (Princeton)
- David Rittenhouse Laboratory, A8

How does nature build complex structures from repetitive strands of nucleic acid lipids and proteins? Furthermore how does nature decide upon what physical principles to use to build these structures? We hope to…



Condensed and Living Matter Seminar: Driven molecular fluxes control the number size and position of an essential phase-separated organelle in algae

Linnea Lemma (Princeton)
- David Rittenhouse Laboratory, TBD

Phase separation of biological molecules has emerged as a key mechanism by which cells organize their interior spaces. Investigating the physical principles by which these biomolecular condensates facilitate cellular…

Past Condensed and Living Matter Seminars



Condensed and Living Matter Seminar: Shot noise in a strange metal

Doug Natelson (Rice University)
- David Rittenhouse Laboratory A8

Strange metal behavior has been observed in materials ranging from high-temperature superconductors to heavy fermion metals. In conventional metals, current is carried by quasiparticles; although it has been…



Condensed and Living Matter Seminar: Active phases and phase transitions drive pattern formation in motile populations of bacteria.

Josh Shaevitz (Princeton)
- David Rittenhouse Laboratory A8

The soil dwelling bacterium Myxococcus xanthus is an amazing organism that uses collective motility to hunt in giant packs when near prey and to form beautiful and protective…



Condensed and Living Matter Seminar: “Fractal patterns in music”

Andrzej Herczyński (Boston College)
- David Rittenhouse Laboratory A8

If aesthetic preferences are influenced by the fractal geometry of nature, scaling regularities would be expected in all art forms, including music. While a variety of statistical tools have been proposed to analyze…



Condensed and Living Matter Seminar: Key issues in understanding the superconductivity of UTe2

Johnpierre Paglione (University of Maryland)
- David Rittenhouse Laboratory A8

The spin-triplet superconductor UTe2 has recently emerged as a rich system that incorporates aspects
of unconventional superconductivity, heavy-electron physics and non-trivial topologies.



Condensed and Living Matter Seminar: Bacterial Swarm, An Active Matter State Enriched by Interfacial Fluid Dynamics

Jay Tang (Brown University)
- David Rittenhouse Laboratory A8

Soft matter, a term not used often a few decades ago, has become a recognized branch of physics studied by researchers worldwide from multiple disciplines. My own random walk in this field started with experiments on…