Talks

Colloquium: Bacterial Biofilms: Navigating the Confluence between Physics and Biology

Biofilms are communities of microorganisms that embed themselves in a matrix of self-secreted extracellular polymeric substances. The matrix protects the microbial community from chemical and mechanical insults, thus favoring its survival and evolutionary success. Biofilms are the primary mode of growth of bacteria and have a crucial impact in environmental, industrial, and medical settings. However, there is a significant lack of understanding about how the physical structure and chemical composition of biofilms determine their resistance to harsh environments. Our work focuses on the bio-physical drivers of biofilm assembly and the emergence of distinctive morphological and mechanical properties. I will showcase examples of biofilms grown under different environmental conditions, ranging from moist surfaces to surfaces exposed to fluid flow and porous media and by different bacterial species. For each case, I will present the experimental platform we developed to investigate the specific system and the results we obtained. Through our research, we discovered that the interplay between biological functions and physics mechanisms controls biofilm assembly, morphology, and rheology, ultimately affecting their physiological protective function. Shedding light on this interplay can help us control biofilm development and shows the prominent role that material science can play in developing novel antimicrobial and antifouling strategies.

CMD Seminar: From quantum many-body scars to optimal steering

The statistical mechanics description of many-particle systems rests on the assumption of ergodicity, the ability of a system to explore all allowed configurations in the phase space. For quantum many-body systems, statistical mechanics predicts the equilibration of highly excited non-equilibrium state towards a featureless thermal state. Hence, it is highly desirable to explore possible ways to avoid ergodicity in quantum systems. In my talk I will discuss a recently discovered mechanism of the weak ergodicity breaking relevant for the experimentally realized Rydberg-atom quantum simulator. I will concentrate on the variational description of unusual quantum many-body revivals that originate from the special eigenstates. I will relate this dynamics to presence of stable periodic trajectories within time-dependent variational principle (TDVP) description of dynamics. I will use TDVP to find new scars, thereby relating scars to optimal control problem. Finally, I will demonstrate an explicit construction of Floquet model generated by quasi-local time dependent Hamiltonian that features exact Floquet quantum scars for any MPS trajectory.

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Colloquium

IMPRS Seminar

Colloquium

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QDS

Colloquium

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Colloquium

QDS

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