Small yet Mighty

Examples of active matter are abundant in nature: bird flocks, fish schools, bacteria colonies and cell layers. Active matter is distinct from most driven systems in that time reversal symmetry (TRS) is broken locally. What are the consequences of the TRS-breaking? How do macroscopic phenomena arise from pure local interactions? I will talk about the progress that has been made along these lines in recent years.
Image by Walter Baxter, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/

Deep under Geneva lies the Large Hadron Collider; thousands of scientists eagerly try to understand the fundamental ingredients of the universe by smashing together protons at a high enough energy to create particles, hoping for some that haven’t been discovered before. Within our incomplete Standard Model of the universe, the charge-flavour conspiracy makes it more likely that within ‘emu’ collisions, electrons and anti-muons (like electrons but heavier) are more likely to be produced in collisions than anti-electrons and muons. If this is not observed in our data, it must be new physics.