Understanding the individual and the macroscopic transport properties of motile micro-organisms in various complex environments, is a timely question, relevant to many ecological, medical and technological applications. At the fundamental level, this question is also receiving a lot of attention as fluids loaded with swimming micro-organisms has become a rich domain of applications for the statistical physics of “active matter”. The existence of microscopic sources of energy borne in the motile character of micro-swimmers is driving self-organization processes at the origin of numerous original effects, new emergent phases and unconventional macroscopic properties.
In this presentation, I will review several experimental studies which led us to revisit standard concepts of the physics of suspensions like Brownian motion, hydrodynamics dispersion or rheological response. I will also present new experiments showing how the motility of bacteria can be controlled such as to extract work macroscopically
Un café sera servi dans le Hall à 11H
PMMH-ESPCI-Sorbonne University