Dresden 2026 – scientific programme
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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik
DY 55: Focus Session: Emergent Transport in Active Systems (joint session DY/BP)
DY 55.2: Talk
Thursday, March 12, 2026, 15:30–15:45, ZEU/0160
Biohybrid active matter: active cargo transport by motile cells — Jan Albrecht1, Lara S. Dautzenberg1, Manfred Opper2, Carsten Beta1, and •Robert Großmann1 — 1University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany — 2Technical University Berlin, Berlin, Germany
We describe the transport of polystyrene beads whose motion is actively driven by cells via direct mechanical contact. We will first discuss the stochastic dynamics of a single cell-cargo pair, focusing on the existence of an optimal cargo size that enhances the diffusion of the load-carrying cells, and estimate the active forces exerted by cells to move colloids. Furthermore, we present the collective transport of these micron-sized particles on a monolayer of motile cells. The colloids' mean-square displacement shows a crossover from superdiffusive to normal-diffusive dynamics. The particle displacement distribution is, however, distinctly non-Gaussian even at macroscopic timescales exceeding the measurement time. We attribute the non-Gaussian statistics to heterogeneity and non-stationarity of the dynamics, and particularly apply a likelihood-based inference framework to estimate the heterogeneity of the bead dynamics from their discretely sampled trajectories. We showcase how this approach can deal with information-scarce situations and provides natural uncertainty bounds for heterogeneity estimates. Similar transport properties are expected for many composite active matter systems. These results thus provide the basis for the future design of cellular microcarriers and for more advanced transport tasks in complex, disordered environments, e.g. tissues.
Keywords: anomalous transport phenomena; active motion; stochastic modeling; physics of living and active systems; statistical inference