Collective motion

Animals exhibit a dazzling array of collective behaviors. Recent studies have characterized the neural representations of relevant behavioral variables, like conspecific-location, in such contexts. However, much less is known about the neural mechanisms mediating interactions between individuals in a group, and the sensorimotor transformations responsible for complex group behavior. To advance our understanding of the neural basis of group behaviors, we studied collective motion (‘schooling’) of micro glassfish (Danionella cerebrum). Danionella schooling emerges during the first 8 weeks post-f

…an experimental investigation of the collective motion of the nematode Turbatrix aceti, which self-propel by body undulation. I will show that under favorable conditions these nematodes can synchronize their body oscillations, forming striking traveling metachronal waves whi

The spontaneous collective motion of self-propelled agents is ubiquitous in the natural world, and it often occurs in complex environments, be it bacteria and cells migrating through polymeric extracellular matrix or animal herds and human crowds navigating structured terrains. Much is known about flocking dynamics in pristine backgrounds, but how do spatio-temporal heterogeneities in the environment impact such collective self-organization? I will present two model systems, a colloidal active fluid negotiating disordered obstacles and a confined dense bacterial suspension in a viscoelastic me

…feature of active matter is collective motion leading to nonequilibrium phase transitions or large scale directed motion [2]. A number of recent works have featured active particles interacting with obstacles, either moving or fixed [3,4,5]. When an active particle encounters an asymmetric obstacle, different behaviours are detected depending on the nature of its active motion. On the one side, rectification effects arise in a suspension of run-and-tumble

Understanding individual and macroscopic transport properties of motile micro-organisms in complex environments is a timely question, relevant to many ecological, medical and technological situations. At the fundamental level, this question is also receiving a lot of attention as fluids loaded with swimming micro-organisms has become a rich domain of applications and a conceptual playground for the statistical physics of “active matter”. The existence of microscopic sources of energy borne by the motile character of these micro-swimmers is driving self-organization processes at the origin of o