Speaker: Dr. Paarth Gulati

Host: Dr. Itamar Kolvin

Title: From Chaos to Control: Structure Formation in Active-Passive Mixtures

Abstract:

Active matter is composed of particles that move by consuming energy, creating materials that can flow, deform, and self-organize far from equilibrium. These active fluids are often chaotic, yet that very chaos offers opportunities for structural control. Understanding how activity couples to material organization provides a path toward designing reconfigurable and controllable soft materials. We study mixtures where an active liquid crystal coexists with a passive fluid and show that active stresses destabilize interfaces, producing traveling waves and spontaneous self-folding that have no analogue in equilibrium systems. In bulk mixtures, activity gives rise to connected filamentary networks in two dimensions, while in three dimensions it generates dynamically arrested, labyrinthine bicontinuous structures that continuously reorganize without coarsening. Together, these results reveal how local energy input and compositional demixing can combine to create self-organized, reconfigurable materials, offering new ways to control morphology and flow in active-passive systems.