Related papers: Phototactic Supersmarticles
Networks of biofilaments are essential for the formation of cellular structures that support various biological functions. For the most part, previous studies have investigated the collective dynamics of rod-like biofilaments; however, the…
Tethered particle motion experiments are versatile single-molecule techniques enabling one to address in vitro the molecular properties of DNA and its interactions with various partners involved in genetic regulations. These techniques…
Multiple scattering is a process in which a particle is repeatedly deflected by other particles. In an overwhelming majority of cases, the ensuing random walk can successfully be described through Gaussian, or normal, statistics. However,…
We study how simple eukaryotic organisms make decisions in response to competing stimuli in the context of phototaxis by the unicellular alga $Chlamydomonas~reinhardtii$. While negatively phototactic cells swim directly away from a…
Collective control of mobile microrobotic swarms is indispensable for their potential high-impact applications in targeted drug delivery, medical diagnostics, parallel micromanipulation, and environmental sensing and remediation. Lack of…
Swarming or collective motion of living entities is one of the most common and spectacular manifestations of living systems having been extensively studied in recent years. A number of general principles have been established. The…
Micro- and molecular-robotic systems act as large-scale swarms. Capabilities of sensing, communication and information processing are very limited on these scales. This short position paper describes a swarm-based minimalistic approach,…
Observing spontaneous velocity ordering or flocking during motility induced phase separation (MIPS) in a system of spherical active Brownian particles without alignment interaction is challenging. We take up this problem by performing…
The motion of an artificial micro-scale swimmer that uses a chemical reaction catalyzed on its own surface to achieve autonomous propulsion is fully characterized experimentally. It is shown that at short times, it has a substantial…
Distance control in many-particle systems is a fundamental problem in nature. This becomes particularly relevant in systems of active agents, which can sense their environment and react by adjusting their direction of motion. We employ…
We consider the collective motion of finite-sized, overdamped Brownian particles (e.g., motor proteins) in a periodic potential. Simulations of our model have revealed a number of novel cooperative transport phenomena, including (i) the…
We investigate theoretically the collective dynamics of soft active particles living in a viscous fluid. We focus on a minimal model for active but non-motile particles consisting of $N>1$ elastic dimers deformed by active stresses and…
Motility is a basic feature of living microorganisms, and how it works is often determined by environmental cues. Recent efforts have focused on develop- ing artificial systems that can mimic microorganisms, and in particular their…
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…
We study a minimal cognitive flocking model, which assumes that the moving entities navigate using exclusively the available instantaneous visual information. The model consists of active particles, with no memory, that interact by a…
Contrary to microbial taxis, where a tactic response to external stimuli is controlled by complex chemical pathways acting like sensor-actuator loops, taxis of artificial microswimmers is a purely stochastic effect associated with a…
We study the distribution of swimming micro-organisms advected by a model turbulent flow and attracted towards a localised light source through phototaxis. It is shown that particles aggregate along a dynamical attractor with fractal…
Movements of molecular motors on cytoskeletal filaments are described by directed walks on a line. Detachment from this line is allowed to occur with a small probability. Motion in the surrounding fluid is described by symmetric random…
The random walk of photons in a tight-binding lattice is known to exhibit diffusive motion similar to classical random walks under decoherence, clearly illustrating the quantum-to-classical transition. In this study, we reveal that the…
The random energy landscapes developed by speckle fields can be used to confine and manipulate a large number of micro-particles with a single laser beam. By means of molecular dynamics simulations, we investigate the static and dynamic…