The work presented in this thesis encompasses numerical and experimental investigations
on three-dimensional (3 D) chaotic advection in a cylindrical domain under laminar flow …

The basin-wide surface transport of tracers such as heat, nutrients and plastic in the North
Atlantic Ocean is organized into large-scale flow structures such as the Western Boundary …

Methods coming from the theory of chaotic scattering are applied to the advection of passive
particles in an open hydrodynamical flow. In a region of parameters where a von Kármán …

We study the transport and mixing properties of flows in a variety of settings, connecting the
classical geometrical approach via invariant manifolds with a probabilistic approach via …

Small particles transported by a fluid medium do not necessarily have to follow the flow. We
show that for a wide class of time-periodic incompressible flows inertial particles have a …

Complex networks provide a timely tool for investigating structural properties associated with
the organization of dynamical processes in “spatially extended” systems. Among others, flow …

Stirring a two-dimensional viscous fluid with rods is often an effective way to mix. The
topological features of periodic rod motions give a lower bound on the topological entropy of …

Topological techniques are powerful tools for characterizing the complexity of many
dynamical systems, including the commonly studied area-preserving maps of the plane …

We study the role of noise on the nature of the transition to collective motion in dry active
matter. Starting from field theories that predict a continuous transition at the deterministic …

Invariant manifolds can serve as a geometric template for the study of chaotic advection. In
particular, global stable and unstable manifolds of invariant hyperbolic or normally …