Related papers: Clustering and pattern formation in chemorepulsive…
Termites which are able to forage in the open can be often seen, in the field or in the lab: (i) wandering around, forming no observable pattern, or (ii) clustering themselves in a dense and almost immobile pack, or (iii) milling about in a…
Recent theoretical studies have predicted a new clustering mechanism for soft matter particles that interact via a certain kind of purely repulsive, bounded potentials. At sufficiently high densities, clusters of overlapping particles are…
We show that two-dimensional bidisperse assemblies of colloids with strictly repulsive interactions exhibit stripe, cluster, and partially crystallized states when driven over a quenched random substrate. The nonequilibrium states on a…
Motile living organisms routinely probe their surroundings to adapt in ever-evolving environments. Although synthetic microswimmers offer surrogates for self-propelled living entities, they often lack the complex feedback mechanisms that…
Non-aligning self-propelled particles with purely repulsive excluded volume interactions undergo athermal motility-induced phase separation into a dilute gas and a dense cluster phase. Here, we use enhanced sampling computational methods…
We study the appearance and properties of cluster crystals (solids in which the unit cell is occupied by a cluster of particles) in a two-dimensional system of self-propelled active Brownian particles with repulsive interactions.…
Clusters appear in nature in a diversity of contexts, involving distances as long as the cosmological ones, and down to atoms and molecules and the very small nuclear size. They also appear in several other scenarios, in particular in…
Colloidal particles, amphiphiles, and functionalized nanoparticles are examples of systems that frequently exhibit short-range attractions coupled with long-range repulsions. In this work, we observe striking differences in the dynamics of…
We report numerical investigations of a three-dimensional model of diffusive growth of fine particles, the internal structure of which corresponds to different crystal lattices. A growing cluster (particle) is immersed in, and exchanges…
We characterize cell motion in experiments and show that the transition to collective motion in colonies of gliding bacterial cells confined to a monolayer appears through the organization of cells into larger moving clusters. Collective…
We study size- and charge-asymmetric oppositely charged colloids driven by an external electric field. The large particles are connected by harmonic springs, forming a hexagonal-lattice network while the small particles are free of bonds…
Flocking, as paradigmatically exemplified by birds, is the coherent collective motion of active agents. As originally conceived, flocking emerges through alignment interactions between the agents. Here, we report that flocking can also…
We survey our research on modeling the mechanisms of control of uniformity in growth of nanosize and colloid particles. The former are produced as nanocrystals, by burst-nucleation from solution. The latter, colloid-size particles, are…
We present a generic mechanism by which reproducing microorganisms, with a diffusivity that depends on the local population density, can form stable patterns. It is known that a decrease of swimming speed with density can promote separation…
Self-organisation is driven by the interactions between the individual components of a system mediated by the environment, and is one of the most important strategies used by many biological systems to develop complex and functional…
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…
Active matter exhibits remarkable collective behavior in which flows, continuously generated by active particles, are intertwined with the orientational order of these particles. The relationship remains poorly understood as the activity…
When an ensemble of self-propelled camphor boats move in a one-dimensional channel, they exhibit a variety of collective behaviors. Under certain conditions, the boats tend to cluster together and move in a relatively tight formation. This…
The trajectories of microswimmers moving in narrow channels of widths comparable to their sizes are significantly altered when they encounter another microswimmer moving in the opposite direction. The consequence of these encounters is a…
Motile bacteria can migrate along chemical gradients in a process known as chemotaxis. When exposed to uniform environmental stress, Escherichia coli cells coordinate their chemotactic responses to form millimeter-sized condensates…