Related papers: Self-motile colloidal particles: from directed pro…
Differently from passive Brownian particles, active particles, also known as self-propelled Brownian particles or microswimmers and nanoswimmers, are capable of taking up energy from their environment and converting it into directed motion.…
Collectives of actively-moving particles can spontaneously separate into dilute and dense phases -- a fascinating phenomenon known as motility-induced phase separation (MIPS). MIPS is well-studied for randomly-moving particles with no…
Many biological microswimmers are capable of chemotaxis, i.e., they can sense an ambient chemical gradient and adjust their mechanism of motility to move towards or away from the source of the gradient. Synthetic active colloids endowed…
Biological systems often involve the self-assembly of basic components into complex and function- ing structures. Artificial systems that mimic such processes can provide a well-controlled setting to explore the principles involved and also…
In this paper, we explore experimentally the phase behavior of a dense active suspension of self- propelled colloids. In addition to a solid-like and a gas-like phase observed for high and low densities, a novel cluster phase is reported at…
The hydrodynamic interactions of a suspension of self-propelled particles are studied using a direct numerical simulation method which simultaneously solves for the host fluid and the swimming particles. A modified version of the "Smoothed…
The transport of motile entities across modulated energy landscapes plays an important role in a range of phenomena in biology, colloidal science and solid-state physics. Here, an easily implementable strategy that allows for the collective…
Biological microswimmers often encounter deformable boundaries in physiological conditions; for instance, the viscoelastic walls of reproductive tract during migration of spermatozoa, or host tissue during early bacterial biofilm formation.…
Movements of molecular motors on cytoskeletal filaments are described by directed walks on a line. Detachment from this line is allowed to occur with a small probability. Motion in the surrounding fluid is described by symmetric random…
Typically, in the description of active Brownian particles, a constant effective propulsion force is assumed, which is then subjected to fluctuations in orientation and translation leading to a persistent random walk with an enlarged…
Chemically powered self-propelled colloids generate a motor force by converting locally a source of energy into directed motion, a process that has been explored both in experiments and in computational models. The use of active colloids as…
We outline a basic strategy of how self-propulsion can be used to improve the yield of a typical colloidal self-assembly process. The success of this approach is predicated on the thoughtful design of the colloidal building block as well as…
Self-propelling particles or microswimmers have opened a new field of investigation with both fundamental and practical perspectives. They represent very convenient model objects for experimental studies of active matter, and have…
Swimming droplets are a class of active particles whose motility changes as a function of time due to shrinkage and self-avoidance of their trail. Here we combine experiments and theory to show that our non-Markovian droplet (NMD) model,…
Recently discrete dynamical models of walking droplet dynamics have allowed for fast numerical simulations of their horizontal chaotic motion and consequently the long-time statistical distribution of the droplet position. We develop a…
We report spontaneous motion in a fully bio-compatible system consisting of pure water droplets in an oil-surfactant medium of squalane and monoolein. Water from the droplet is solubilized by the reverse micellar solution, creating a…
Chemical control of the spontaneous motion of a reactive oil droplet moving on a glass substrate under an aqueous phase is reported. Experimental results show that the self-motion of an oil droplet is confined on an acid-treated glass…
Catalytic microswimmers convert the chemical energy of a fuel into motion, sustaining spatial chemical gradients and fluid flows that drive their propulsion. This leads to unconventional individual behavior and the emergence of collective…
Micromotors pushed by biological entities, like motile bacteria, constitute a fascinating way to convert chemical energy into mechanical work at the micrometer scale. Here we show, by using numerical simulations, that a properly designed…
Taking inspiration from the crawling motion of biological cells on a substrate, we consider a physical model of self-propulsion where the spatio-temporal driving can involve both, a mechanical actuation by active force couples, and a…