Related papers: A Drop of Active Matter
Rheotaxis is a well-known phenomenon among microbial organisms and artificial active colloids, wherein the swimmers respond to an imposed flow. We report the first experimental evidence of upstream rheotaxis by spherical active droplets. It…
Compound particles are a class of composite systems in which solid particles encapsulated in a fluid droplet are suspended in another fluid. They are encountered in various natural and biological processes, for e.g., nucleated cells,…
A rectangular grid formed by liquid filaments on a partially wetting substrate evolves in a series of breakups leading to arrays of drops with different shapes distributed in a rather regular bidimensional pattern. Our study is focused on…
Applications such as digital microfluidics and bio-diagnostics rely on droplet locomotion. A prominent example of such motion is durotaxis, a phenomenon that requires a stiffness gradient along a surface for the transport of liquids, cells,…
How internal forces are transduced into motion through soft, fluid membranes remains a fundamental question in the study of active systems. To investigate this coupling, we develop a minimal system consisting of a single ferromagnetic…
I put forward a continuum theory for active nematic gels, defined as fluids or suspensions of orientable rodlike objects endowed with active dynamics, that is based on symmetry arguments and compatibility with thermodynamics. The starting…
An evaporating droplet is a dynamic system in which flow is spontaneously generated to minimize the surface energy, dragging particles to the borders and ultimately resulting in the so-called "coffee-stain effect". The situation becomes…
Numerous cell-types have shown a remarkable ability to detect and move along gradients in stiffness of an underlying substrate -- a process known as durotaxis. The mechanisms underlying durotaxis are still unresolved, but generally believed…
Liquid drops on soft solids generate strong deformations below the contact line, resulting from a balance of capillary and elastic forces. The movement of these drops may cause strong, potentially singular dissipation in the soft solid.…
Whether live cell membranes show miscibility phase transitions (MPTs), and if so, how they fluctuate near the transitions remain outstanding unresolved issues in physics and biology alike. Motivated by these questions we construct a generic…
An inkjet printer head, which is capable of depositing liquid droplets with a resolution of $22$ picoliters and high repeatability, is employed to investigate the wetting dynamics of drops printed on a horizontal plane as well as on a…
Active droplets are artificial microswimmers built from a liquid dispersion by microfluidic tools and showing self-propelled motion. These systems hold particular interest for mimicking biological phenomena, such as some aspects of cell…
Electrically actuated continuous motion of a water droplet over PDMS-coated single active electrode is analyzed from detailed modeling and experiments. In an experiment, continuous motion of the droplet is achieved when it is located over…
Dynamics of spreading of viscous non - volatile fluid droplets on surfaces is modelled using a solid - on - solid model, which is studied with Monte Carlo simulations. Tendency for dynamical layering and surface attraction are in part…
The unsteady electrorotation of a drop of a viscous weakly conducting polarizable liquid suspended in another viscous weakly conducting polarizable liquid immiscible with the former in an applied constant uniform electric field is…
Over the past decade the study of fluidic droplets bouncing and skipping (or ``walking'') on a vibrating fluid bath has gone from an interesting experiment to a vibrant research field. The field exhibits challenging fluids problems,…
Inspired by dense contractile tissues, where cells are subject to periodic deformation, we formulate and study a generic hydrodynamic theory of pulsating active liquids. Combining mechanical and phenomenological arguments, we postulate that…
Soft materials such as colloidal suspensions, polymer solutions and liquid crystals are constituted by mesoscopic entities held together by weak forces. Their mechanical moduli are several orders of magnitude lower than those of atomic…
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,…
The hydrodynamic theory of active nematics has been often used to describe the spatio-temporal dynamics of cell flows and motile topological defects within soft confluent tissues. Those theories, however, often rely on the assumption that…