Bidirectional Zigzag Growth from Clusters of Active Colloidal Shakers
Abstract
Driven or self-propelling particles moving in viscoelastic fluids recently emerge as novel class of active systems showing a complex yet rich set of phenomena due to the non-Newtonian nature of the dispersing medium. Here we investigate the one-dimensional growth of clusters made of active colloidal shakers, which are realized by oscillating magnetic rotors dispersed within a viscoelastic fluid and at different concentration of the dissolved polymer. These magnetic particles when actuated by an oscillating field display a flow profile similar to that of a shaker force dipole, i.e. without any net propulsion. We design a protocol to assemble clusters of colloidal shakers and induce their controlled expansion into elongated zigzag structures. We observe a power law growth of the mean chain length and use theoretical arguments to explain the measured exponent. These arguments agree well with both experiments and particle based numerical simulations.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2402.02939,
title = {Bidirectional Zigzag Growth from Clusters of Active Colloidal Shakers},
author = {Gaspard Junot and Andrés Javier Manzano González and Pietro Tierno},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.02939},
year = {2024}
}