Related papers: Rational design and fabrication of versatile activ…
Colloidal gels are prime examples of functional materials exhibiting disordered, amorphous, yet meta-stable forms. They maintain stability through short-range attractive forces and their material properties are tunable by external forces.…
Over the past decade, autophoretic colloids have emerged as a prototypical system for studying self-propelled motion at microscopic scales, with promising applications in microfluidics, micromachinery, and therapeutics. Their motion in a…
We review recent experimental, numerical, and analytical results on active suspensions of self-propelled colloidal beads moving in (quasi) two dimensions. Active colloids form part of the larger theme of active matter, which is noted for…
An artificial microswimmer drifts in response to spatio-temporal modulations of an activating suspension medium. We consider two competing mechanisms capable of influencing its tactic response: angular fluctuations, which help it explore…
Recent progress in colloidal science has led to elaborate self-assembled structures whose complexity raises hopes for elaborating new materials. However, the throughputs are extremely low and consequently, the chance to produce materials of…
Micron-sized self-propelled (active) particles can be considered as model systems for characterizing more complex biological organisms like swimming bacteria or motile cells. We produce asymmetric microswimmers by soft lithography and study…
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…
Designing protocols to dynamically direct the self-assembly of colloidal particles has become an important direction in soft matter physics because of the promising applications in fabrication of dynamic responsive functional materials.…
The design of artificial microswimmers has generated significant research interest in recent years, for promise in applications such as nanomotors and targeted drug-delivery. However, many current designs suffer from a common problem,…
We review recent advances in the design, synthesis, and modeling of active fluids. Active fluids have been at the center of many technological innovations and theoretical advances over the past two decades. Research on this new class of…
Active colloids self-organise to a variety of collective states, ranging from highly motile 'molecules' to complex 3D structures. Using large-scale simulations, we show that hydrodynamic interactions, together with a gravity-like aligning…
Evaporating colloidal droplets have long been used as model systems to understand capillarity, interfacial transport, and particle assembly, most prominently through the coffee ring effect. In classical descriptions, suspended particles are…
Endowing materials with physical intelligence holds the key for a progress leap in robotic systems. In spite of the growing success for macroscopic devices, transferring these concepts to the microscale presents several challenges connected…
Active colloids and externally actuated semi-flexible filaments provide basic building blocks for designing autonomously motile micro-machines. Here, we show that a passive semi-flexible filament can be actuated and transported by attaching…
In equilibrium, the physical properties of matter are set by the interactions between the constituents. In contrast, the energy input of the individual components controls the behavior of synthetic or living active matter. Great progress…
The dynamics of a spherical chemically-powered synthetic colloidal motor that operates by a self-diffusiophoretic mechanism and has a catalytic domain of arbitrary shape is studied using both continuum theory and particle-based simulations.…
The locomotion and design of microswimmers are topical issues of current fundamental and applied research. In addition to numerous living and artificial active microswimmers, a passive microswimmer was identified only recently: a soft,…
The self-propulsion of artificial and biological microswimmers (i.e., active colloidal particles) has often been modelled by using a force and a torque entering into the overdamped equations for the Brownian motion of passive particles.…
Self-propelled nanoparticles moving through liquids offer the possibility of creating advanced applications where such nanoswimmers can operate as artificial molecular-sized motors. Achieving control over the motion of nanoswimmers is a…
Active matter systems may be characterised by the conversion of energy into active motion, e.g. the self-propulsion of microorganisms. Artificial active colloids form models which exhibit essential properties of more complex biological…