Active Matter

Last two decades brought a spectacular increase of scientific research devoted to synthetic and living systems that extract energy from their environment at the single particle level and convert to mechanical work in the form of self-propulsion. These systems are out-of-equilibrium and manifest a variety of collective phenomena as the control parameters are tuned. Examples of active matter include systems as diverse as flocks of birds, motile microorganisms, molecular motors and synthetic Janus particles in an active medium. The emergent dynamics of these systems at the particulate level (superdiffusion, mean propulsion speed, velocity fluctuations, etc.) can be probed  using X-ray scattering methods (USAXS, XPCS, etc.). Current inhouse activities involve phoretic dynamics induced by solvent phase separation, self-phoretic dynamics of Janus colloids in catalytic media, etc. The scattering methods derive ensemble averaged static and dynamic information in the thermodynamic limit. The PSCM provides support to users for the investigation of model systems using different scattering methods, following the approval by the peer review.