The induced dynamics from a nonequilibrium and active environment

One of the main topics in statistical mechanics is the study of objects and their dynamics in contact with an environment. The concept of temperature is an important example: we know that objects tend to assume the temperature of the environment. This rests on the assumption of thermal equilibrium in the environment, which is often a good approximation. In the last decades, statistical mechanics has however turned its attention to systems that are out of equilibrium, for example because they are subject to constant driving while being in contact with one or more equilibrium reservoirs.In this project, we want to go a step further and to investigate environments that are themselves out of equilibrium. How does such an environment act on a body?Such questions are of increasing importance for biological and medical applications due to micro-engineering in out-of-equilibrium environments. We are particularly interested in so called active environments, where the 'activity' refers to models of self-propelled particles (such as bacteria, molecular motors and nanobots) or to strongly time-dependent media.

Keywords:active particles, Brownian motion, nonequilibrium, fluctuating dynamics

Disciplines:Statistical mechanics, Transport properties and non-equilibrium processes, Soft condensed matter, Biophysics not elsewhere classified, Applied mathematics in specific fields not elsewhere classified