[This is the old program from SS 2006. The current program and contact information can be found here.]

28 April 2006, 16:00

Dorothea Busse (Institut für Biologie, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Spatio-temporal dynamics of cell signalling [Abstract] 

19 May 2006, 16:00

Karsten Reuter (Abteilung Theorie, Fritz-Haber-Institut der MPG, Berlin)
First-principles statistical mechanics approaches to heterogeneous catalysis [Abstract] 

02 June 2006, 16:00

Blas Echebarría (Departament de Física Aplicada, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain)
Instabilities of scroll waves in excitable media [Abstract] 

23 June 2006, 16:00

Hermann Riecke (Department of Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics, Northwestern University, Evanston, USA)
Spatio-temporal chaos in convection: defects, bursts, and spirals  

Abstract:
Many physical, chemical, and biological systems undergo transitions from a spatially homogeneous state to states that exhibit spatio-temporal structures. In simple cases the resulting patterns are ordered in space and time. Often, however, they are spatio-temporally chaotic. What is the origin of such states, how can they be characterized? For stripe-like patterns these questions have been addressed in quite some detail. I will first present our results for spatio-temporal chaos based on patterns with hexagonal planform and will focus on spatio-temporal chaos in non-Boussinesq fluid convection. There the systematic reduction to equations of the Ginzburg-Landau type provides detailed insight into the complex dynamics, which are characterized by defects and by bursts. Then I will discuss our analysis of complex lamellar patterns in terms of a number of their geometric properties and will present results for spiral-defect chaos in Boussinesq and non-Boussinesq convection.

14 July 2006, 16:00

Martin Baurmann (Institut für Chemie und Biologie des Meeres, Carl-von-Ossietzky-Universität Oldenburg)
Pattern formation in microbiogeochemical models [Abstract]