Abstract:
How can physics help us understand the remarkable organization and collective behaviour of living systems,
which operate far from thermodynamic equilibrium? Active matter provides a minimal physical framework for
addressing this question: individual constituents consume energy to generate stress or persistent motion,
while their interactions give rise to emergent collective behaviour.

In this talk, I will trace a path from the stochastic dynamics of a single active particle to collective motion
and, ultimately, to organization in living systems. I will begin with the stochastic thermodynamics of active
particles, focusing on how microscopic irreversibility can be quantified through entropy production. I will then
introduce an exact analytical framework that we developed for active-particle dynamics, and show how confinement,
inertia, chirality, and fluctuating propulsion give rise to non-trivial re-entrant transitions. Together, these
results highlight how exact approaches can help us build a deeper physical understanding of non-equilibrium dynamics.

I will then move from individual particles to the collective behaviour that emerges through interactions, including
ordering, phase separation, pattern formation, and collective motion. Finally, I will broaden the perspective to
biological systems, showing how ideas from statistical physics can help us understand chromosome organization and
segregation in bacteria, FtsZ-mediated Z-ring formation during cell division, and robust intracellular transport
by molecular motors.

Across these examples, theory is closely connected to experiment, with several of our predictions already supported
by observations. Together, they show how a small set of physical ingredients –stochastic dynamics, interactions,
confinement, and energy consumption — can generate rich organization across scales, highlighting the predictive
power of statistical physics in understanding living matter.

Abstract:
Radiation therapy is a great example of the application of physics in oncology. The objective of radiation therapy is to deliver sufficient high dose to the target volume in the patient to achieve the maximum malignant cell kill while minimizing the dose both to the nearby organs at risk and to the normal tissue.
Recent technological advances have provided many tools for highly conformal physical dose delivery. Functional image-guided radiotherapy and possible enhancement of the body’s antitumor immunity with radiation have the potential to improve the tumour control probability. This talk will provide a review of the current state-of-the-art radiation therapy and will outline some of the future developments to enhance its efficacy.

Abstract:
In this elementary talk, we discuss some physical phenomena where hydrogen-bonds and hence proton dynamics play a key role. We mainly focus on the water-and-squaric acid system. In the first half of the talk, we discuss various aspects of proton dynamics in liquid water and the effect of external fields such as electric and magnetic fields on it. Moving on to the solid water state, i.e ice-water we review the recent classical and quantum theory of proton dynamics in governing various emergent physics and effective electrodynamics and gauge excitations similar to light. Finally, we try to connect the proton dynamics to the physics of a certain frustrated magnetic system called spin-ice system and its collective low-energy excitations. In the second half of the talk, we focus on squaric acid system and review the earlier experimental and theoretical efforts to model the physical phenomena such as phase transitions from para-electric to ferroelectric phase linking to confinement to deconfinement transition. We then move on to briefly present our work on squaric acid system using high-order perturbation theory and quantum simulations to extract various properties of these phase transitions and phases. We also discuss how such squaric acid system may harbor anyonic excitations in certain conditions. At the end, we outline some open issues about the water and squaric acid system that could be of future interest.

Abstract:
Neutrinos produced in cosmic ray interactions in the atmosphere provide a unique and independent probe to explore the internal structure and composition of the deep Earth, which is complementary to traditional seismic and gravitational measurements and would pave the way for multi-messenger tomography of Earth. I will discuss the two different approaches to perform Earth tomography with neutrinos: (i) neutrino absorption tomography, based on partial absorption of a high-energy TeV-PeV neutrino flux as it propagates through Earth and (ii) neutrino oscillation tomography, based on Earth matter effects due to the coherent forward scattering of multi-GeV neutrinos with the ambient electrons modifying neutrino oscillation patterns.