Physical Math Seminar
Building 2, Room 449, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA
Speaker: Olivia Pomerenk (Brown University) Title: Flocking and floating: collective behavior in fluid systems Abstract: Collective behavior emerges across biological scales, from the self-assembly of particles and cells to the coordinated motion of insects, fish, and birds. This talk explores mathematical approaches to two examples of collective behavior in fluid environments: passive particles interacting through a deformable interface at the capillary scale, and active agents interacting through wakes at the inertial scale. In the first half, we develop a generalized boundary-element framework for capillary interactions among arbitrary three-dimensional particle assemblies at a fluid interface. An iterative approach identifies equilibrium configurations while allowing for particle tilting and nontrivial contact-line geometry. This provides a general framework for characterizing how particle geometry and assembly configurations produce attraction, repulsion, and collective organization, with applications ranging from cellular and sub-cellular self-assembly to insects at the air-water interface. In the second half, we shift from passive particles to active agents, and from the…