Related papers: Rational design and fabrication of versatile activ…

Active gels are a class of biologically-relevant material containing embedded agents that spontaneously generate forces acting on a sparse filament network. In vitro experiments of protein filaments and molecular motors have revealed a…

Colloidal particles are considered ideal building blocks to produce materials with enhanced physical properties. The state-of-the-art techniques for synthesizing these particles provide control over shape, size, and directionality of the…

Transport phenomena in out-of-equilibrium systems is immensely important in a myriad of applications in biology, engineering and physics. Complex environments, such as the cytoplasm or porous media, can substantially affect the transport…

Micrometre sized colloidal particles can be viewed as large atoms with tailorable size, shape and interactions. These building blocks can assemble into extremely rich structures and phases, in which the thermal motions of particles can be…

Hypothesis: Colloidal molecules with anisotropic shapes and interactions are powerful model systems for deciphering the behavior of real molecules and building units for creating materials with designed properties. While many strategies for…

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…

In modern applications of heterogeneous liquid-phase nanocatalysis, the catalysts (e.g., metal nanoparticles) need to be typically affixed to a colloidal carrier system for stability and easy handling. "Passive carriers" (e.g., simple…

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…

Active motion at complex fluid-fluid interfaces is a ubiquitous phenomenon in nature. However, an intriguing question that is not fully addressed is how active motion affects and gets influenced by its complex environment. Here, we design a…

Liquids composed of self-propelled particles have been experimentally realized using molecular, colloidal, or macroscopic constituents. These active liquids can flow spontaneously even in the absence of an external drive. Unlike spontaneous…

In analogy to nanoscopic molecules that are composed of individual atoms, we consider an active "microswimmer molecule". It is built up from three individual magnetic colloidal microswimmers that are connected by harmonic springs and…

Recent advancements in active colloidal systems aim to mimic key characteristics of biological microswimmers, particularly their adaptive motility in response to environmental changes. While many approaches rely on externally imposing a…

Biological functions in each animal cell depend on coordinated operations of a wide variety of molecular motors. Some of the these motors transport cargo to their respective destinations whereas some others are mobile workshops which…

Autonomous and driven transport in chiral active fluids have been shown to exhibit features that cannot be accommodated within the classical formulation of fluid mechanics, due to the role of odd viscosity. We generalize the theory of…

Active matter, exemplified by adaptive living materials such as the actomyosin cytoskeleton, can navigate material parameter space dynamically, leading to unconventional mechanical responses. In particular, it can self-drive toward elastic…

Microswimmers and active colloids often move in confined systems, including those involving interfaces. Such interfaces, especially at the microscale, may deform in response to the stresses of the flow created by the active particle. We…

Activity and autonomous motion are fundamental aspects of many living and engineering systems. Here, the scale of biological agents covers a wide range, from nanomotors, cytoskeleton, and cells, to insects, fish, birds, and people. Inspired…

Self-propelled colloidal particles exhibit rich non-equilibrium phenomena and have promising applications in fields such as drug delivery and self-assembled active materials. Previous experimental and theoretical studies have shown that…

Collective motion in actively propelled particle systems is triggered on the very local scale by nucleation of coherently moving units consisting of just a handful of particles. These units grow and merge over time, ending up in a…

Synthetic microswimmers mimicking biological movements at the microscale have been developed in recent years. Actuating helical magnetic materials with a homogeneous rotating magnetic field is one of the most widespread techniques for…