Welcome to the pages of the working group Wittkowski

Theory of active soft matter
This working group moves to RWTH Aachen University. Its new website can be found at the following URL:https://www.dwi.rwth-aachen.de/en/arbeitsgruppe/rg-wittkowski

Overview

The group “Theory of active soft matter” is a working group at the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the University of Münster and supported through the Emmy Noether Programme of the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft). Our research mainly belongs to the field of soft condensed matter physics and has a focus on “active soft matter”. In particular, we investigate suspensions of passive and active colloidal particles. While ordinary passive colloidal particles are already widespread in everyday life and of great relevance, e. g., for chemical industry, active colloidal particles constitute a relatively new field of research, where the foundations for novel applications are currently being laid. Furthermore, we study a wide range of topics from various fields based on the methods of statistical physics. (Details)

Five selected publications (more)

  1. M. te Vrugt, J. Bickmann and R. Wittkowski,
    Eff ects of social distancing and isolation on epidemic spreading modeled via dynamical density functional theory,
    Nature Communications 11, 5576 (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-19024-0 (link to the article)
  2. R. Wittkowski, A. Tiribocchi, J. Stenhammar, R. J. Allen, D. Marenduzzo and M. E. Cates,
    Scalar ϕ4 field theory for active-particle phase separation,
    Nature Communications 5, 4351 (2014). DOI: 10.1038/ncomms5351 (link to the article)
  3. M. te Vrugt, T. Frohoff-Hülsmann, E. Heifetz, U. Thiele and R. Wittkowski,
    From a microscopic inertial active matter model to the Schrödinger equation,
    Nature Communications 14, 1302 (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-35635-1 (link to the article)
  4. J. Stenhammar, R. Wittkowski, D. Marenduzzo and M. E. Cates,
    Light-induced self-assembly of active rectification devices,
    Science Advances 2, e1501850 (2016). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1501850 (link to the article)
  5. M. te Vrugt, H. Löwen and R. Wittkowski,
    Classical dynamical density functional theory: from fundamentals to applications,
    Advances in Physics 69, 121-247 (2020). DOI: 10.1080/00018732.2020.1854965 (link to the article)