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Living microorganisms in confined systems typically experience an affinity to populate boundaries. The reason for such affinity to interfaces can be a combination of their directed motion and hydrodynamic interactions at distances larger…
Nanoscale topographic features of solid surfaces can induce complex metastable behavior in colloidal and multiphase systems. Recent studies on single microparticle adsorption at liquid interfaces have reported a crossover from fast…
Colloidal Janus spheres in water (one hemisphere attractive and the other repulsive) assemble into two-dimensional hexagonal crystals with orientational order controlled by anisotropic interactions. We exploit the decoupled translational…
We numerically investigate the propelled motions of a Janus particle in a periodically phase-separating binary fluid mixture. In this study, the surface of the particle tail prefers one of the binary fluid components and the particle head…
Charge profiles in liquid electrolytes are of crucial importance for applications, such as supercapacitors, fuel cells, batteries, or the self-assembly of particles in colloidal or biological settings. However, creating localised (screened)…
Many fascinating properties of biological active matter crucially depend on the capacity of constituting entities to perform directed motion, e.g., molecular motors transporting vesicles inside cells or bacteria searching for food. While…
Particle sedimentation through porous media is limited by the inability of passive material to overcome surface interactions and a tortuous network of pores. This limits transport, delivery, and effectiveness of chemicals used as reactants,…
We investigate the transport diffusivity of artificial microswimmers, a.k.a. Janus particles, moving in a sinusoidal channel in the absence of external biases. Their diffusion constant turns out to be quite sensitive to the self-propulsion…
Comprehensive understanding of particle motion in microfluidic devices is essential to unlock novel technologies for shape-based separation and sorting of microparticles like microplastics, cells and crystal polymorphs. Such particles…
The ability to dictate colloid motion is an important challenge in fields ranging from materials science to living systems. Here, by embedding energy landscapes in confined nematic liquid crystals, we design a versatile platform to define…
We demonstrate that migration away from self-produced chemicals (chemorepulsion) generates a generic route to clustering and pattern formation among self-propelled colloids. The clustering instability can be caused either by anisotropic…
In living cells, molecular motors create activity that enhances the diffusion of particles throughout the cytoplasm, and not just ones attached to the motors. We demonstrate initial steps toward creating artificial cells that mimic this…
At the surfaces of autophoretic colloids, slip velocities arise from local chemical gradients that are many-body functions of particle configuration and activity. For rapid chemical diffusion, coupled with slip-induced hydrodynamic…
Microscopic active droplets are able to swim autonomously in viscous flows: this puzzling feature stems from solute exchanges with the surrounding fluid via surface reactions or their spontaneous solubilisation, and the interfacial flows…
We propose that a photonic array of resonant circular dielectric waveguides with subwavelength grating can be designed as a robust and sensitive topological chemical sensor. The device can detect trace amounts of a given chemical species…
This work presents experimental and theoretical analyses of electrokinetic flow in microchannels with glass and silica surfaces across a broad range of electrolyte concentrations (0.01 to 100 mM). We demonstrate simple but effective…
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…
We investigate the dynamics of micron-scale drops pushed across a hydrophobic or superhydrophobic surface. The velocity profile across the drop varies from quadratic to linear with increasing height, indicating a crossover from a sliding to…
A class of binary mixtures of Janus fluids formed by colloidal spheres with the hydrophobic hemispheres constrained to point either up or down are studied by means of Gibbs ensemble Monte Carlo simulations and simple analytical…
We present a new, high-speed technique to track the three-dimensional translation and rotation of non-spherical colloidal particles. We capture digital holograms of micrometer-scale silica rods and sub-micrometer-scale Janus particles…