Speaker
Dr
Oksana Manyuhina
(Nordita, Stockholm)
Description
Soft matter essentially differs from hard matter and thus
the approaches to study it are also different. Since the
typical energy scale between the components of soft matter
system is of the order of k_BT, the fluctuating and curved
geometries are energetically accessible, and the language of
differential geometry becomes useful. When we consider soft
materials with characteristic length scale of the order of
microns (thousands of molecules) the phenomenology turns out
to be an adequate tool to describe the collective behaviour
of the system. In this talk I will consider two examples:
shape transformation of self-assembled spherical vesicles in
presence of magnetic fields and spontaneous crawling of
keratocyte cells. Our theoretical findings give insight into
recent experimental observations.
