About

AGM² is a notice board for people who work on analytical and geometric methods for microstructure: news, papers, events and job openings, in one place and in a monthly email.

Microstructure here means how the constituents of a continuum (molecules, grains, crystals, cells, fibres) are organised below the scale at which it is described as a continuum. This organisation often comes from their collective behaviour, such as alignment or ordering. It enters the continuum description as extra fields, such as a director, a Q-tensor or an orientation distribution, and it shapes how the material behaves at large scales. The topics include:

• ordered fluids: nematic and smectic liquid crystals, Q-tensors and their defects, ferrofluids, active matter, kinetic and continuum models;
• plasmas: magnetohydrodynamics, kinetic models, anisotropic transport in magnetised plasmas, dusty plasmas and plasma crystals;
• ice and geophysics: crystal fabric of ice, anisotropic flow of glaciers and ice sheets;
• solids and elasticity: liquid crystal elastomers and networks, origami, prestrained shells, shape-morphing structures;
• microstructure in solids: twins and laminates, shape-memory alloys, martensitic phase transitions;
• biological matter: nematic order in cell layers and tissues, collagen and other fibrous tissues, membranes, bacterial colonies;
• analysis and geometry: calculus of variations, constrained problems and variational inequalities, homogenisation and Γ-convergence, defects and topology, geometry of order-parameter spaces;
• numerical methods: finite element, finite volume, spectral and particle methods, Monte Carlo simulation, solvers and preconditioners, structure-preserving discretisations.

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