Treatment of out-of-equilibrium systems is always a challenge. A proper accounting (or ignoring) of the liquid particle coupling in simulation models describing driven colloidal systems should depend on the rate of energy injection into the colloid. Coarse-grained models that properly balance the direct many-body and fluid-mediated interactions provide vital information on the mechanisms governing out-of-equilibrium dynamics and assembly. However, an exact accounting of the particles-fluid coupling in response to external periodical excitations is computationally challenging and simplifying assumptions usually have to be made. Within the framework of this workshop, we aim to focus discussions on the role of fluid-particle coupling in the dynamics of self-assembly in externally driven and self-propelled colloids and on the appropriate simulation methods to address this coupling. We will include new emerging themes such as dynamics of active colloids, the coupling to anisotropic liquids such as liquid crystals [34,39] and transport of soft matter at the nanoscale and in thermodynamic gradients.

The planned workshop will be an ideal opportunity to create a constructive discussion between researches in the field of non-equilibrium self-assembly. The proposed workshop is a follow-up on the two similar events organized by us in 2012 and 2014. An attractive characteristic of the previous two workshops was a good mixture of experiment, computational models and theory and we intend to keep this structure: We will bring together experimentalists and theoreticians and focus on bridging the gaps between the computational approaches on different levels of coarse graining [30]. The previous workshops identified several areas of overlap as well as pointed out new promising areas of research and ignited a number of collaborations. We have put together a lively community of researchers from various backgrounds working on emergent dynamics. Due to the rapid progress in the field, the next workshop in 2016 would be essential in order to keep up the pace.

The topic of the workshop has a considerable overlap with the research topics within a recently approved ITN network NANOTRANS ("Transport of Soft Matter at the Nanoscale", coordinated by Jure Dobnikar and Daan Frenkel). Therefore, we anticipate an active involvement of NANOTRANS researchers in the proposed workshop. Moreover, we expect that partial funding to support the workshop will be available within the network.