PHYSICS SEMINAR by Aşkın Kocabaş

For those curious about nature, swarming grasshoppers, flocking starlings, and schooling sardines are among the most mesmerizing rituals observed in our daily lives. Our understanding of why animals perform these collective behaviors in wild nature is still very limited. Can we use basic symmetry and evolutionary arguments to understand the fundamental principles behind these exotic phenomena? In this talk, I will review our experimental efforts to uncover this mystery in the lab. Using active matter physics, we have discovered a surprising connection between non-Hermitian physics, parity-time symmetry, and collective behaviors. The combination of these concepts offers new perspectives into the emerging dynamics of interacting biological systems...