THE REGISTRATION IS NOW CLOSED.
When: 7-11 July, 2025.
Where: Leiden (The Netherlands).
Costs: €150 (for contributed participants, inclusive of refreshments and conference dinner).
In 1995, Támas Vicsek, John Toner and Yuhai Tu, brought for the first time the notion of “flocking” within the realm of statistical physics. While the excitement for the renormalization group and the new physics of critical phenomena at equilibrium was still alive, the mysterious beauty of collective motion in animals and other non-equilibrium systems was about to take the physics community back to square one of its understanding of emergent phenomena. In the following three decades, these isolated efforts grew into a niche and the niche eventually blossomed into a whole multidisciplinary field at the interface between statistical physics, soft matter physics, fluid mechanics and biophysics: the physics of active matter.
Thirty years later, active matter has evolved into one of the most vibrant and productive areas of physics, with hundreds of articles published every year. While the paradigm of active matter was initially introduced as a toy model for collective motion in animals, it has now developed into a comprehensive theoretical and experimental framework, able to portray a surprisingly broad class of living and non-living systems across length scales: from flocks of starlings, down to self-propelled colloidal particles, bacterial colonies, collective cell migration in tissues, the cell cytoskeleton and, in general, any natural or synthetic system whose building blocks can autonomously move or generate mechanical work.
On the occasion of STATPHYS29, we propose to gather at Leiden University a selection of the most talented junior and senior scientists in active matter, to discuss the most exciting recent developments and anticipate the most pressing future challenges in the field. Our immediate goal is to stimulate an active communication between researchers operating in different areas of active matter, foster new collaborations and provide the younger researchers with a stimulating environment to interact with each other and with the pioneers of the field.
Invited participants
- Massimo Pica Ciamarra (NTU, Singapore).
- Livio Carenza (Koç U., Turkey).
- Sarah Loos (Cambridge U, UK).
- Amin Doostmohammadi (NBI, Denmark).
- Carmen Miguel (UBarcelona, Spain).
- Ricard Alert (MPI Dresden, Germany).
- Alexander Mietke (U Oxford, UK).
- Irene Giardina (La Sapienza U., Italy).
- Denis Bartolo (ENS Lyon, France).
- Liesbeth Jannssen (TU/e, Netherlands).
- Yariv Kafri (Technion, Israel).
- Yilin Wu (CU Hong Kong, China).
- Cecile Cottin-Bizonne (U. Lyon, France).
- Sumesh Thampi (IIT Madras, India).
- Edouard Hannezo (IST Austria, Austria).
- Corinna Maass (U Twente, The Netherlands).
- Giuseppe Gonnella (U Bari, Italy).
- Zvonimir Dogic (UCSB, USA).
- Alexandra Tayar (Weizmann Inst., Israel)
- Shashi Thutupalli (NCBS, India)
- Mahesh Bandi (OIST, Okinawa, Japan)
- David Nelson (Harvard U, USA)
- Alberto Fernandez-Nieves (U Barcelona, Spain)
- Olivier Dauchot (CNRS, France)
- Sriram Ramaswamy (IISC Bangalor, India)
Organizers:Luiza Angheluta-Bauer, Leticia Cugliandolo, Luca Giomi, Ramin Golestanian, Julien Tailleur and Julia Yeomans
