Related papers: Rational design and fabrication of versatile activ…
Equilibrium self-assembly and conventional materials processing techniques fall far short of mimicking dynamic self-actuating processes that are commonplace throughout biology. To bridge the gap between living and synthetic matter, we study…
Active matter comprised of self-propelled interacting units holds a major promise for extraction of useful work from its seemingly chaotic out-of-equilibrium dynamics. Streamlining active matter to produce work is especially important at…
Harnessing active matter requires strategies that break the directional symmetry of self-propelled motion without altering the propulsion mechanism itself. Here, we show that magnetically inert spherical active colloids can be steered…
Droplets, sub-millilitre liquid volumes with at least one interface, have traditionally served as compartments for storing, transporting, and delivering materials. Beyond familiar applications in food, coatings, and consumer goods, they…
Active colloids and liquid crystals are capable of locally converting the macroscopically-supplied energy into directional motion and promise a host of new applications, ranging from drug delivery to cargo transport at the mesoscale. Here…
Circular swimmers with tunable orbit radius and chirality are gaining attention due to their potential to illustrate novel collective phases in simulations and synthetic and biological active matter. Here, we present a facile experimental…
Soft materials, such as colloidal suspensions, polymer solutions, and biological systems, are typically multicomponent mixtures of macromolecules and simpler components (e.g., microions, monomers, solvent) that can assemble into complex…
This review treats asymmetric colloidal particles moving through their host fluid under the action of some form of propulsion. The propulsion can come from an external body force or from external shear flow. It may also come from…
Physics governing the locomotion of microorganisms and other microsystems is dominated by viscous damping. An effective swimming strategy involves the non-reciprocal and periodic deformations of the considered body. Here, we show that a…
Active matter physics and swarm robotics have provided powerful tools for the study and control of ensembles driven by internal sources. At the macroscale, controlling swarms typically utilizes significant memory, processing power, and…
Active colloidal microswimmers serve as archetypical active fluid systems, and as models for biological swimmers. Here, by studying in detail their velocity traces, we find robust power-law intermittency with system-dependent exponential…
The ability to design artificial micro/nanomachines able to perform sophisticated tasks crucially depends on the understanding of their interaction with biosystems and their compatibility with the biological environment. Here, Janus…
Colloidal particles dispersed in liquid crystals can form new materials with tunable elastic and electro-optic properties. In a periodic `blue phase' host, particles should template into colloidal crystals with potential uses in photonics,…
Active matter, comprising many active agents interacting and moving in fluids or more complex environments, is a commonly occurring state of matter in biological and physical systems. By its very nature active matter systems exist in…
The spatiotemporal dynamics in systems of active self-propelled particles is controlled by the propulsion mechanism in combination with various direct interactions, such as steric repulsion, hydrodynamics, and chemical fields. Yet, these…
Mixtures of active and passive particles are ubiquitous at the microscale. Many essential microbial processes involve interactions with dead or immotile cells or passive crowders. When passive objects are immersed in active baths, their…
Topological defects play a central role in the physics of many materials, including magnets, superconductors and liquid crystals. In active fluids, defects become autonomous particles that spontaneously propel from internal active stresses…
We study the collective motion of confined spherical microswimmers such as active colloids which we model by so-called squirmers. To simulate hydrodynamic flow fields including thermal noise, we use the method of multi-particle collision…
Suspended colloidal particles interacting chemically with a solute are able to self-propel by autophoretic motion when they are asymmetrically patterned (Janus colloids). Here we demonstrate that the chemical anisotropy is not a necessary…
Active colloids in liquid crystals (ACLCs) is an active matter with qualitatively new facets of behavior as compared to active matter that becomes isotropic when relaxed into an equilibrium state. We discuss two classes of ACLCs: (i)…