Turci group
Biography
I am a lecturer at the School of Physics, University of Bristol (UK).
I am interested in nonequilibrium disordered systems. My focus is on emergent properties, collective behaviour and spatial structure in a wide range of systems: from glasses to animals, from gels to bones.
Research Interests & Activities
In my research, I design computational routes to explore the emergent behaviour of nonequilibrium, disordered systems. This has led me to contribute in a wide range of areas, from material science to animal behaviour, from transport to physiology.
Collective behaviour and active matter
Active matter ecompasses systems that dissipate energy locally, for example, via self-propulsion. These nonequilibrium routes lead to new phenomena, e.g. pattern formation and motility-induced phase separation. The study of active systems is strongly inspired by living matter, so colonies of ants, groups of birds, and schools of fish can all be seen through the same lens. Also, artificial active matter can be realised in the lab, for example, with robot swarms or self-catalytic colloidal particles, to have a precise control on the interactions and governing parameters.
In my research I investigate both fundamental problems (such as the wetting properties of active fluids) and applications, using particle-based computer simulation and in close collaboration with experimentalists.
Dynamic arrest and glasses
If you happen to deal with a dense, disordered system there are strong chances that it will display features of so called “glassiness”, the most striking of which is dynamic arrest: the progressive slowing down of the dynamics upon coolingg (or increasing the density) with limited structural changes.
Understanding glassiness helps us with many different problems: from material science (new disordered solids, like metallic glasses) to morphogenesis (where dense layers of cell cooperate to give rise to functional tissues). The tools and frameworks developed to understand glassy behaviour are employed to reveal common mechanisms across length and time scales and discover new physics.
A distinctive feature of dynamic arrest is the emergence of strong dynamical heterogeneities, i.e. inhomogeneous distributions of the mobility in space. The origin of such heterogeneity is debated, and my work explored extensively through advanced simulations its relationship with structural and geometrical features. Working with experimentalists, I have tested these ideas to see how they play out in the real world.
Structure and metastability
Soft matter is the study of materials where the relevant energy scale is of the same order of the tehrmal fluctuations. This means that energy and entropy have comparable roles in defining the emrgence of the material properties. Soft materials a re typically complex and are everywhere around us (e.g. food and drugs) and in many ways we can think that many parts of our body is made of them, from the stream of blood cells in the veins to the growth of tissues and bones.
In my work I focussed on the emergence of structure in these complex materials, with a particular attention to the local, micro-structural properties, and often working directly on the analysis of experimental data (where advcanced 3D image analysis techniques and machine learning turn out to be very useful).