News

Physicist Etienne Fodor explains active matter

  • Faculté des Sciences, des Technologies et de Médecine (FSTM)
    04 mai 2023
  • Catégorie
    Recherche
  • Thème
    Physique & sciences des matériaux

During his inaugural lecture which took place on 2 May 2023 in Belval, Prof. Etienne Fodor presented his research activities lying at the crossroad of statistical mechanics, soft matter and biophysics. Participants had the opportunity to learn more about his current activities and future projects.

The event was introduced by Prof. Jean-Marc Schlenker, Dean of the Faculty of Science, Technology and Medicine, who presented Etienne Fodor. After a PhD at the Université Paris Diderot on the nonequilibrium properties of active systems, Etienne worked as an Oppenheimer Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge for three years and finally joined the University of Luxembourg in 2020 as an FNR ATTRACT Fellow for the five-year project “Statistical Mechanics of Active Matter”.

Etienne started his lecture by defining active matter: “It is a class of nonequilibrium systems where each microscopic constituent consumes energy to produce an autonomous, directed motion” and by presenting it across different domains. He took several examples such as cell assemblies, animal groups and human crowds to demonstrate how the combination of individual self-propulsion and interactions between individuals leads to collective effects without any equilibrium equivalent.

He then investigated how to control the emerging collective behaviour and how to extract the resulting energy by using thermodynamics. Etienne finally took the example of waves in biological tissues, and especially the study of dynamical patterns emerging here from collective contraction waves.

Regarding his future challenges, Prof. Fodor would like to be able to study the thermodynamics of these patterns, and to investigate the interplay between topology and energetics in biological systems.