Related papers: Active colloids in liquid crystals
Active particles, including swimming microorganisms, autophoretic colloids and droplets, are known to self-organize into ordered structures at fluid-solid boundaries. The entrainment of particles in the attractive parts of their spontaneous…
The past two decades have seen a remarkable progress in the development of synthetic colloidal agents which are capable of creating directed motion in an unbiased environment at the microscale. These self-propelling particles are often…
Active particles under soft confinement such as droplets or vesicles present intriguing phenomena, as collective motion emerges alongside the deformation of the environment. A model is employed to systematically investigate droplet…
Light provides a powerful means of controlling physical behavior of materials but is rarely used to power and guide active matter systems. We demonstrate optical control of liquid crystalline topological solitons dubbed "skyrmions", which…
Flagellated microswimmers B. Subtilis dispersed in a nematic phase of a lyotropic chromonic liquid crystal form a living liquid crystal (LLC). The combination of the passive and active components allows us to analyze how the active…
Active particles affect their environment as much as the environment affects their active motion. Here, we present an experimental system where both can be simultaneously adjusted in situ using an external AC electric field. The environment…
We study how dispersions of colloidal particles in a cholesteric liquid crystal behave under a time-dependent electric field. By controlling the amplitude and shape of the applied field wave, we show that the system can be reproducibly…
We investigate the transport of interacting active run-and-tumble particles moving under an external drift force through a periodic array of obstacles for increasing drive amplitudes. For high activity where the system forms a motility…
X-shaped liquid crystalline molecules (XLCMs) are obtained by tethering two flexible end A-blocks and two flexible side B-blocks to a rigid backbone (R). A rich array of ordered structures can be formed from XLCMs, driven by the competition…
Detection of chiral molecules requires amplification of chirality to measurable levels. Typically, amplification mechanisms are considered at the microscopic scales of individual molecules and their aggregates. Here we demonstrate chirality…
We propose a hybrid lattice Boltzmann algorithm to simulate the hydrodynamics of colloidal particles inside a liquid crystalline host. To validate our algorithm, we study the static and the microrheology of a colloid in a nematic, with…
Wet active matter in the presence of an imposed temperature gradient, or chemical potential gradient, is considered. It is shown that there is a new type of convective instability that is caused by a (negative) activity parameter.…
Using Brownian dynamics computer simulations we show that a two-dimensional suspension of self-propelled ("active") colloidal particles crystallizes at sufficiently high densities. Compared to the equilibrium freezing of passive particles…
The active Phase-Field-Crystal (aPFC) model combines elements of the Toner-Tu theory for self-propelled particles and the classical Phase-Field-Crystal (PFC) model that describes the transition between liquid to crystalline phases. In the…
We study the chiral symmetry breaking and metastability of confined nematic lyotropic chromonic liquid crystal (LCLC) with and without chiral dopants. The isotropic-nematic coexistence phase of the LCLC renders two confining geometries:…
Bacterial assemblies exhibit rich collective behaviors that control their biological functions, making them a relevant object of study from an active matter physics perspective. Dense bacterial suspensions self-organize into distinct…
We report a molecular dynamics simulation demonstrating that a columnar liquid crystal, commonly formed by disc-shaped molecules, can be formed by identical particles interacting via a spherically symmetric potential. Upon isochoric cooling…
A heterogeneous and dilute suspension of catalytically active colloids is studied as a non-equilibrium analogue of ionic systems, which has the remarkable feature of action-reaction symmetry breaking. Symmetrically coated colloids are found…
Electro-hydrodynamic phenomena in liquid crystals constitute an old but still very active research area. The reason is that these phenomena play the key role in various applications of liquid crystals and due to the general interest of…
We study a system of active particles with soft repulsive interactions that lead to an active cluster-crystal phase in two dimensions. We use two different modelizations of the active force - Active Brownian particles (ABP) and…