Dresden 2026 – scientific programme

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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 29: Active Matter IV (joint session DY/BP/CPP)

DY 29.5: Invited Talk

Tuesday, March 10, 2026, 15:00–15:30, ZEU/0160

Designing topological edge states in bacterial active matter — Yoshihito Uchida¹, Daiki Nishiguchi^2,1, and •Kazumasa A. Takeuchi¹ — ¹The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan — ²Institute of Science Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

Besides its potential relevance to the life sciences, active matter also manifests as a novel, intrinsically non-equilibrium kind of matter, endowed with characteristic transport properties distinguished from conventional matter. A challenge is how to control and design transport in active matter. A potentially useful, emerging concept here is topological transport developed in condensed matter physics, which was extended to active matter successfully, but experimental realizations have thus far relied on the chirality of the active particles, which limits design capabilities.

Here we report a controlled realization of topological edge states in dense bacterial suspension, induced by microfabricated geometry instead of the bacteria's chirality. First we demonstrate that we can rectify bacterial collective motion by a channel with asymmetric shape. Then we construct networks made of asymmetric channels and show that we can control the emergence of topological edge states through the network design. Through modelling and experiments, we discuss what properties of the network and the bacterial flow are crucial to the observed topological phenomenon. We expect our results may pave the way for establishing a control and design principle of topological transport in such active matter systems.

Ref) Y. Uchida, D. Nishiguchi, and K. A. Takeuchi, to appear.

Keywords: active matter; topological edge state; bacteria; non-Hermitian physics