Sami Al-Izzi: A twist on active membranes

I will discuss some of our recent results on active chiral and nematic membranes. The chiral stresses we consider give rise to a novel form of odd elasticity. To outline this phenomenology I will give explicit calculations outlining spontaneous flow transitions and shape instabilities. I will discuss the relevance of these results in developmental biology and their relation to active nematics, in particular how certain limits of active nematic membranes can reduce to a theory of an isotropic membrane with an active stress defined by the deviatoric part of the shape operator.