In this talk, I will first introduce the new state of matter of non-equilibrium hyperuniform fluid that we found in systems of active colloids, and its hydrodynamic theory. Afterwards, I will talk about the generalized hyperuniform fluid of reactive particles and the related continuous and discontinuous absorbing phase transitions. We found that the discontinuous absorbing transition of hyperuniform fluid cannot occur through the kinetic pathway of nucleation and growth, and the phase transition rate decreases with increasing the system size. This implies that the metastable non-equilibrium hyperuniform fluid is 'kinetically stable' in the thermodynamic limit, which challenges the common understanding of metastability in discontinuous phase transitions. This 'metastable yet kinetically stable' hyperuniform fluid features a new hyperuniform scaling S(k→0)~k^1.2.

Dr. Ni is an associate professor in the School of Chemistry, Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology in Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He received his Ph.D. of Physics in 2012 from Utrecht University (the Netherlands) working with Prof. Marjolein Dijkstra focusing on the computational study on the self-assembly of colloidal systems. From 2012 to 2014, he did his postdoc with Profs. Martien A. Cohen Stuart and Peter G. Bolhuis focusing on the self-assembly of fibril-forming polypeptides. In 2014, he was awarded the NWO VENI fellowship which is the most prestigious personal grant for young scientists in the Netherlands to start independent research lines. In 2016, he was awarded the Best Research Prize by the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) Action – Flowing Matter [An annual prize for European Early Stage Researchers in soft matter within eight years after the date of PhD]. His research has been published in a number of top scientific journals, e.g. Nature, Nature Communications, Science Advances, PNAS, PRL, etc.