Flow of Information in Living Systems

This guest lecture by Dr. Arnab Saha explores the flow of information in living systems through the lens of statistical mechanics and information theory. Learn how living entities communicate and transfer information within groups for purposes like foraging, migration, and threat avoidance. Dr. Saha, a faculty member at the Department of Physics, University of Calcutta and current Fellow-in-residence at CY Advanced Studies, presents his research on modeling living entities as active (self-propelling) particles under confinement. Discover how self-organization of particles depends critically on whether confinement is soft or hard, and examine what happens when trap boundaries are instantaneously quenched from soft to hard. The lecture demonstrates how information about environmental changes flows throughout a cluster of particles, propagating ballistically across the entire group. Dr. Saha brings expertise from his background in Stochastic Thermodynamics and Active Matter Physics, developed during his PhD at S.N.Bose National Center and postdoctoral work at Max Planck Institute and Heinrich Heine University.