Abstract: The recent years have witnessed the emergence and fast growth of research on "active matter", which can be loosely defined as systems in which energy is spent locally to produce directed (athermal, non-random) motion. Examples abound in biology from the subcellular scale to animal groups, but also in man-made systems such as active colloids, shaken granular media, as well as swarms of robots and "ad-hoc" networks in information technologies. Statistical physics naturally plays a central role in this interdisciplinary context thanks to the universal relevance of its tools and concepts. I will illustrate this situation using mostly results from my own work, from numerical and theoretical studies of minimal models of active matter to experimental and observational works in which I was involved.

About the Speaker: Dr. Hugues Chaté obtained his PhD from Université Pierre & Marie Curie in 1990, under the supervision of Yves Romeau and Paul Mannevill. After a short visit at Bell Laboratories in USA, he joined CEA Saclay (French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission) as a researcher and promoted to Senior Scientist in 2002. Dr. Chaté's research focuses on the study of out-of-equilibrium phenomena, phase transitions and pattern formation in complex systems. During his PhD work, he discovered a type of spatiotemporal intermittency, via which a transition to turbulence is observed in a partial differential equation. In the following years, he did a series of important works on this topic. More recently, he shifted his attention to active matter and has made a number of important and original contributions to the subject. Besides, he has done excellent work on chaos, percolation, synchronization and even the voter model in social science. He is now divisional associate editor of Physical Review Letters, scientific director of Paris Complex Systems Institute (ISC-RIF), and also chair of the steering committee of Dynamics Days Europe. He has published more than 130 papers in refereed journals, including 1 in Nature, 1 in PNAS and 45 in PRL, with 4,300 citations in total.

Date&Time: March 26, 2014 (Wednesday), 10:00-11:00 a.m. 
Location: 606 Conference Room, No.3 Heqing Road, Haidian District