New postdoctoral researcher Sam Cameron

Welcome to new postdoctoral researcher Sam Cameron who will be working with Elsen Tjhung on Elsen's EPSRC-funded research project Thermodynamics of growing active and living matter. Sam joins the OU from the University of Bristol where he completed his PhD.

The goal of the Thermodynamics of growing active and living matter project is to extend the theory of stochastic thermodynamics to non-equilibrium and fast processes. When we learnt classical thermodynamics from undergraduate physics/chemistry, we often assumed a large number of particles >10^23, equilibrium, and extremely slow processes. In this very restrictive limit, thermodynamic quantities such as heat dissipation Q can be computed using the textbook formula Q=T\Delta S, where S is the configurational entropy. However, in real lives, most physical processes are neither slow nor equilibrium. For example, the engine strokes inside our cars can happen very fast and cannot be accurately described by the classical theory of thermodynamics. On the other hand, many biological processes are also far from equilibrium. For example, a cell can divide into two daughter cells. The time-reversed process in which two daughter cells merge into a single giant cell is never observed in experiments, which is a violation of time-reversal symmetry. Incidentally, violation of time-reversal symmetry is a defining feature of non-equilibrium processes. The aim of my research is to generalize the theory of thermodynamics to non-equilibrium processes such as cell division and cell death.