Biophysics and Complex Systems

Welcome to the home page of The Biophysics and Complex Systems Group at the Technical University of Denmark.

The group is located at the second floor of Building 309. The main phone number is (+45) 4525 3208, and one e-mail is . For directions on how to reach the campus please consult the main website of our university.

We are six scientific staff members, a secretary, and a number of PhD and master thesis students. The administrator of BioSim, an EU-sponsored Network of Excellence in Biosimulation, is also associated with the group.

Our main areas of research are:

1. Complex fluid flows, free surfaces and instabilities
2. Bifurcation analysis and chaos theory
3. Systems biology, and
4. Phase locking of fluxon motion in Josephson junctions

We combine theoretical and experimental investigations of instabilities that produce structure formation in fluid flows. Particular emphasis has been given to the formation of polygoneal structures in connection with the so-called hydraulic jump. We are also trying to understand problems related to flow separation in insect flights and other systems of biological interest.

Living systems operate under far-from-equilibirum conditions, and the complex temporal behaviors we can observe in the form of spiking and bursting cells, oscillatory flow and pressure regulations, pulsatile hormone releases, multimode dynamics, synchronization, wave propagation, etc., result from instabilities and nonlinear dynamic processes in the variety of interacting feedback regulations. Our aim is to develop a better understanding of some of these phenomena through a detailed analysis of the involved physical and chemical processes. This requires a close collaboration with leading experimentally oriented biophysicists, biologists and physiologists so that model formulation and experiments can go hand in hand.

At the same time we collaborate with leading mathematicians and theoretical physicists in the develoment of the more theoretical aspects of nonlinear dynamics and chaos theory (chaotic synchronization, clustering, phase instabiliy, etc.) including the formulation of new approaches to nonlinear time-series analysis (e.g., double wavelet analysis), the application of nonlinear dynamics to technical control systems (e.g., pulse-width modulated dc power supply systems), and the development of object-oriented simulation tools and interval calculus. 

Beside contributing to the Department's basic courses in physics, the group offers a number of specialized courses in bifurcation and chaos theory, systems biology (biosimulation), continuum physics (fluid dynamics), and the theory of relativity. The group also offers MSc and PhD courses within our fields of expertice.