Speaker
Description
I will present experimental evidence of universal geometry in diverse active fluids, from dog kidney cells, and human breast cancer cells, to pathogenic bacteria. I will discuss how this universal geometry is encoded in conformal invariance of vorticity contours, which, surprisingly, show statistics consistent with critical percolation in all the systems. I will then show how this universality and conformal symmetry can become broken or restored upon molecular perturbations of cellular systems. I will then present results from modeling and experiments on reconstituted systems and swimming bacteria that put forward the notion of conformal phase transition in active fluids. Finally, I will discuss topological signatures of this phase transition and end with introducing topological strings in the context of an active fluid that is subject to external aligning field.