Topic: filaments

This lecture examines the hierarchy of clouds, filaments and dense cores from which stars form. Gravity competes with turbulent motions and magnetic support before collapse produces a young star and surrounding disk. Observations from space telescopes and millimetre arrays connect these processes to the earliest stages of planetary systems.

Filaments (slender, microscopic elastic bodies) are prevalent in biological and industrial settings. In the biological case, the filaments are often active, in that they are driven internally by motor proteins, with the prime examples being cilia and flagella. For cilia in particular, which can appear in dense arrays, their resulting motions are coupled through the surrounding fluid, as well as through surfaces to which they are attached. In this talk, I present numerical simulations exploring the coordinated motion of active filaments and how it depends on the driving force, density of fil