Events

Living systems across all scales constantly consume and convert chemical energy to sustain the biological processes essential to life. From the rhythmic pulsing of developing embryos to active intracellular protein transport, the stunning dynamism of these processes can often seem beyond the grasp of simple theoretical descriptions. Thermodynamics is among the most successful frameworks in the physical sciences precisely because it can describe how and why systems in or near equilibrium undergo radical changes. Yet many living or active processes are decidedly out of equilibrium. Moreover, materials at the core of our modern energy technologies are often subject to operating conditions that push them far from equilibrium. As a result, there is a pressing need to extend, develop, and introduce genuinely nonequilibrium perspectives in the physical sciences. In this talk, I will provide a broad overview of my group’s recent efforts toward understanding pattern formation, phase coexistence, and interfacial phenomena for systems arbitrarily far from equilibrium. Beginning from microscopic dynamics and systematically coarse-graining to the fields of interest, we can identify clear limits in which classical thermodynamic theories – e.g., Maxwell constructions, capillary wave theory, and classical nucleation barriers – are recovered but with new physical interpretations. Our perspective identifies the crucial role of both linear and nonlinear transport coefficients and offers an entirely mechanical formulation for determining these coefficients. Finally, we will offer hope for translating these findings to physical intuition that may guide experiments.

Ahmad Omar is an Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at UC Berkeley where his research group uses theory and computation to better understand soft materials out of equilibrium. Ahmad joined the Berkeley faculty in 2021 after postdoctoral studies also at Berkeley and graudate studies at Caltech.