Charlie Duclut (Institut Curie)
Renormalization group approach to the collective dynamics of chemotactic cells
Understanding how living systems self-organize into complex structures is one of the major challenges of modern physics. A generic mechanism that drives such organization is interaction among the individual elements — which may represent cells, bacteria, or even enzymes — via chemical signals. After deriving a minimal microscopic model for a single chemotactic particle, I will present a coarse-grained model to describe an assembly of such particles. I will be interested both in the case where cell number is constant, and in the case where cell can grow and divide. The consequences of breaking this conservation law on the scaling properties of this model will be discussed using a dynamical renormalization group approach.