Microbes get sick too. These viral infections transform the fates of microbial cells, populations, and communities. The infection and lysis of individual microbes releases new virus particles and redirects carbon and nutrients back into the environment. Yet, there is increasing evidence that the ecological outcome of infections is often nuanced and includes a spectrum of fates beyond rapid infection and lysis. This talk combines insights from mathematical models, in vivo experiments, and field data to explore how inefficient infection and non-lytic outcomes shape the use of phage as therapeutics and the impact of phage on marine ecosystems.
Disordered elastic systemsare ubiquitous and encompass a rich variety of systems ranging from amorphous solids, colloidal suspensions and network glasses to dislocation systems, biopolymer fiber networks, confluent cell tissues and even strange metals and machine learning. TheJamming transition characterizes the loss of rigidity of a large class of amorphous materials and provides one of the most paradigmatic frameworks to describe the critical behavior that is exhibited by several classes of disordered viscoelastic systems. In this talk, I will discuss the fascinating statistical physics of systems near jamming and show results of a new theory that is both analytically tractable, and that includes an interesting crossover scaling behavior. I will then combine this theory with phenomenological scaling arguments to derive the singular behavior of the dynamic response near this transition, which I will use to determine critical exponents, invariant scaling combinations and analytical formulas for universal scaling functions of a variety of quantities. Finally, I will show how these results can shed light into the anomalous charge-density fluctuations of strange metals and discuss how the incorporation of active elements (self-propulsion) affects the universal scaling framework of a class of disordered elastic systems.
