Proliferating Active Matter - 1/N
These are some unpolished broad thoughts on my recent focus on growth as a source of activity in condensed matter. I am now transcribing my scientific rants. If given tenure I will resort to writing review papers on my rants. So life goes on. Let's consider the hydrogen atom of biology: the cell. What do I mean by growth? The changes in size? The changes in density? Ageing? All of it. But I want to talk about proliferation here. My first introduction to growth as a source of activity was in the context of bacterial range expansion, specifically this work by Hallatschek et al, which explains how two strains of E. Coli. (one labelled by GFP, one by RFP) when plated initially in a well-mixed manner, segregate into sector-like patterns. I was fresh out of undergrad and studying how lambda-phages infect bacteria . Birth and death processes lead to interesting spatiotemporal patterning in these systems and these bacteria being non-motile, the dominant source of motion and activity is gr