Dynamics and thermodynamics in artificial and natural active systems with delay

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Active self-propulsion is one of the important traits giving living organisms an evolutionary edge. Already the self-propulsion techniques harnessed by primitive forms of unicellular life, such as bacteria and sperm cells, are quite complicated, though. Their beating flagella or dynamic body shape changes call for simplified models to grasp the physical principles of their collective motion. On the other hand, recent experimental and technological progress has supplied a large arsenal of artificial microswimmers that can be activated and even steered in a well-understood and well-controlled way. We can now endow them with increasingly sophisticated physical and virtual mutual interactions that enable us to mimic the emerging complexity observed in the living world, within a bottom-up approach. In particular, we can deliberately design experimental systems that are theoretically tractable, and idealized theoretical predictions promising interesting collective behavior can guide the experimental design. This strategy is at the heart of the present proposal, which aims to foster a close collaboration between experiment, analytical theory and computer simulations. Our focus will mostly be on self-organization and dynamical scaling of interacting swimmers with/without confinement, conformational entropy and information fluxes, and passive probes in active-matter environments. As an important innovative aspect, we want to systematically investigate the role of time-delayed mutual interactions. The long-term goal is to contribute conceptual milestones and paradigmatic model systems for an ongoing increasingly general and unified coarse-grained dynamic and thermodynamic description of active matter.