Emergence of Collective Behaviour in Motile Marine Organisms

能动实体的集体动力学是“活性物质”领域内的主要领域之一，其中大规模的协调来自最小尺度的能量输入。这一广泛研究领域的双重目标仍然是开放的，涉及理解协调运动出现背后的物理机制，以及捕获该物理学的偏微分方程的发展。因此，这项工作完全符合EPSRC的研究领域：（i）生物物理学和软物质，（ii）数学生物学和（iii）复杂性科学。在这个项目中，重点是被称为植物-动物蠕虫的真核生物，其大尺寸（毫米）和分布式运动源（纤毛地毯）使实验表征生物体间相互作用的流体动力学，驱动形成显着的宏观循环涡流连贯游泳。它将涉及实验研究的个别生物体的游泳，流体动力学的新方法，以验证其成对的相互作用，和新的实验方法，以阐明过渡到集体行为作为一个功能的浓度的有机体。同时，过渡到集体行为将被描述的理论模型来自动力学理论，占这些个人和成对的动态。

Collective dynamics of motile entities is one of the primary areas within the field of 'active matter', where large-scale coordination emerges from energy input at the smallest scales. The twin goals of this broad area of research, still open, involve understanding the physical mechanisms behind the emergence of coordinated motion, and the development of partial differential equations that capture that physics. As such, the work fits squarely within the EPSRC researchareas of (i) Biological Physics and Soft Matter, (ii) Mathematical Biology, and (iii) Complexity Science. In this project, the focus is on eukaryotic organisms known as plant-animal worms, whose large size (millimetres) and distributedsource of motility (ciliary carpets) enable experimental characterisation of the fluid dynamics of inter-organism interactions that drive the formation of remarkable macroscopic circulating vortices of coherent swimming. It will involve experimental investigations of the swimming of individual organisms, novel methods of fluid dynamics to characterise their pairwise interactions, and new experimental methods to elucidate the transition to collective behaviour as a functionof the concentration of organisms. Concurrently, the transition to collective behaviour will be described by a theoretical model derived from kinetic theory, accounting for those individual and pairwise dynamics.