Active Field Theories

Understand

Lecture Notes for Les Houches 2018 Summer School on Active Matter and Nonequilibrium Statistical Physics.

• These notes give an introduction to statistical field theories of active matter.
• After showing an example of how such theories can be created bottom-up by explicit coarse graining of active particle models, the main approach taken here is top-down: minimal terms are added to well-studied stochastic field theories of passive systems that break time-reversibility and thereby cause nonzero steady-state entropy production.
• These theories are, so far, rather poorly understood compared to their passive counterparts.