Related papers: Sorting motile rods by activity

We study an experimental system of hard granular squares in two dimensions, energized by vibration. The interplay of order in the orientations and positions of anisotropic particles allows for a rich set of phases. We measure the structure…

For many applications, it is important to catch collections of autonomously navigating microbes and man-made microswimmers in a controlled way. Here we propose an efficient trap to collectively capture self-propelled colloidal rods. By…

Viscously damped objects driven through a periodically modulated potential energy landscape can become kinetically locked in to commensurate directions through the landscape, and thus can be deflected away from the driving direction. We…

We theoretically predict and experimentally demonstrate that several different particle species can be separated from each other by means of a ratchet device, consisting of periodically arranged triangular (ratchet) shaped obstacles. We…

We study the driving of colloidal molecular crystals over periodic substrates such as those created with optical traps. The n-merization that occurs in the colloidal molecular crystal states produces a remarkably rich variety of distinct…

Combining model experiments and theory, we investigate the dense phases of polar active matter beyond the conventional flocking picture. We show that above a critical density flocks assembled from self-propelled colloids arrest their…

While the collective motion of active particles has been studied extensively, effective strategies to navigate particle swarms without external guidance remain elusive. We introduce a method to control the trajectories of two-dimensional…

Collective behavior of self-propelled particles is observed on a microscale for swimmers such as sperm and bacteria as well as for protein filaments in motility assays. The properties of such systems depend both on their dimensionality and…

Our study explores the mixture of polar particles in apolar environment. We employ a coarse-grained approach to model the mixture, where polar particles are in minority. The interaction between polar and apolar components is incorporated…

We study the behavior of negatively charged colloids with two positively charged polar caps close to a planar patterned surface. The competition between the different anisotropic components of the particle-particle interaction patterns is…

We derive the full set of macroscopic equations necessary to describe the dynamics of systems with active polar order in a viscoelastic or elastic background. The active polar order is manifested by a second velocity, whose non-zero modulus…

We study collections of self-propelled rods (SPR) moving in two dimensions for packing fractions less than or equal to 0.3. We find that in the thermodynamical limit the SPR undergo a phase transition between a disordered gas and a novel…

We investigate the collective behavior of sterically interacting self-propelled particles confined in a harmonic potential. Our theoretical and numerical study unveils the emergence of distinctive collective polar organizations, revealing…

Granular materials are inherently out-of-equilibrium systems due to energy dissipation through inelastic collisions and friction. When driven by mechanical agitation such as vibration, they exhibit rich collective behaviors including…

We measure the torque acting on a rod rotated perpendicular to its axis in a granular bed, through which an upflow of gas is utilized to tune the hydrostatic loading between grains. At low rotation rates the torque is independent of speed,…

We show that colloidal molecular crystal states interacting with a periodic substrate, such as an optical trap array, and a rotating external field can undergo a rapid pattern switching in which the orientation of the crystal changes. In…

We investigate the ordering properties of vertically-vibrated monolayers of granular cylinders in a circular container at high packing fraction. In line with previous works by other groups, we identify liquid-crystalline ordering behaviour…

We analyse collective motion that occurs during rare (large deviation) events in systems of active particles, both numerically and analytically. We discuss the associated dynamical phase transition to collective motion, which occurs when…

How do flocks, herds and swarms proceed through disordered environments? This question is not only crucial to animal groups in the wild, but also to virtually all applications of collective robotics, and active materials composed of…

The orientational order in vertically agitated granular rod monolayers is investigated experimentally and compared quantitatively with equilibrium Monte Carlo simulations and density functional theory. At sufficiently high number density,…