Coming up next
2025-12-11 - 13:30 @
SLAM Seminar: Jenna Elliott (Daniela’s/Martin’s guest)
Title: Selective information transmission by particle distributions at interfaces
Abstract:
Living cells are capable of responding and adapting to environmental cues under noisy conditions, providing an ideal platform for uncovering the physical principles for robust information processing in soft materials. Motivated by the role of membranes in relaying signals across living cell boundaries, in this talk I will present a mechanism for selective information transmission across interfaces using spatially-varying particle distributions. First, I will show that particle distributions can act as signal filters that non-linearly amplify heterogeneities in their environment. These filters permit a form of pattern recognition, with interparticle interactions tuning the response function of the filter. Accounting for thermal noise in the filters, I will then present quantifications of the information flow across the interface. When suitably tuned, these noisy filters selectively compress input signals, resulting in the efficient encoding of information relevant to downstream tasks. Overall, these results indicate that the noisy patterning of membranes may be used to selectively sense environmental cues in biologically inspired systems, suggesting exciting implications for how physical interactions may encode computational logic in soft materials.