Self-Organizing and Evolving Active Matter

The workshop aimed at providing the current state of the art and exploring future directions
how active matter self-organizes into a variety of dynamic structures also in complex environments,
how smart active or intelligent matter can be created using methods from machine learning, and
how active matter evolves under birth, growth, and death. For this, 11 sessions were organized that
covered the whole field and reported on active interfaces, cells on surfaces, colloids and droplets,
complex environments, emergent collective motion, synchronization, molecular self-assembly, active
motion in complex fluids, smart active matter, as well as chiral and non-reciprocal active matter.

The workshop also provided the annual meeting of the core-to-core network, The physics of selforganizing
active matter, organized by Ryoichi Yamamoto (Kyoto University) that brings together
the active-matter communities from Japan, China, United Kingdom, and Germany.

The workshop attracted a lot of attention with more than 110 participants, which had to be
selected from significantly more applications. Roughly 30% of the participants came from Japan
and China. Overall we had a very international participation, in particular, from younger scientists.
We had more than 30 invited talks and ca. 1/3 were given from colleagues at an earlier stage of
their careers or who have just secured a permanent position. The 24 contributed talks and 50
posters were mostly presented by younger scientists.

The workshop provided a platform for lively discussions, where the state of the art of the
field of active matter was reviewed in its breadth. It also showed how current research explores
the boundaries of the field and advances in new directions. One highlight was the colloquium
talk by Anke Lindner (ESPCI Paris), who reviewed recent experimental and theoretical progress
in understanding single and collective bacterial motion. Alexander Mietke (Oxford University)
explained the modeling of active surfaces, relevant for our understanding of cell biology. Katja Taute
(Universit¨at Leipzig) addressed the physics of growing bacterial colonies, highlighting the energetic
trade-off of bacterial growth and spatial exploration. Akira Kakugo explored swarm formation and
its relevance for the robotic field. At the macroscopic scale, Danielle Chase (University of Colorado
Boulder) presented recent discoveries on information processing and self-organization in honey
bees. C´ecile Cottin-Bizonne (Universit´e de Lyon) shared their findings regarding the magnetoactive
hydrodynamic coupling involved in the self-assembly of magnetotactic bacteria.

These are just a few highlights. In general, all the talks and poster were presented on a high
level. The participants explicitly praised the success of the workshop concerning both science and
the perfect organization.