Related papers: Light-controlled Assembly of Active Colloidal Mole…
Living systems are made of active materials with microscopic components that work together to perform macroscopic biological tasks. The breakdown of these collective functionalities leads to diseases, which, conversely, could be treated by…
Living organisms are molecular systems with self-sustained dynamics via energy conversion through molecular cooperation, resulting in highly complex macroscopic behaviors. Construction of such autonomous macroscopic dynamics at a molecular…
Self-organization is the generation of order out of local interactions in non-equilibrium [1]. It is deeply connected to all fields of science from physics, chemistry to biology where functional living structures self-assemble[2] and…
We introduce a simple dynamical rule in which each particle locates a particle that is farthest from it and moves towards it. Repeated application of this algorithm results in the formation of unusual dynamical patterns: during the process…
Active materials take advantage of their internal sources of energy to self-organize in an automated manner. This feature provides a novel opportunity to design micron-scale machines with minimal required control. However, self-organization…
Large ensembles of interacting, out-of-equilibrium agents are a paradigm of active matter. Their constituents' intrinsic activity may entail the spontaneous separation into localized phases of high and low densities. Motile microbes,…
In this book chapter, we review how systems of simple motile agents can be used as a pathway to intelligent systems. It is a well known result from nature that large groups of entities following simple rules, such as swarms of animals, can…
Complex colloidal cluster morphologies are desirable for the fabrication of advanced materials, such as photonic crystals and meta-materials, and can be formed through evaporation-driven packing. By coupling lattice Boltzmann and discrete…
These lecture notes are designed to provide a brief introduction into the phenomenology of active matter and to present some of the analytical tools used to rationalize the emergent behavior of active systems. Such systems are made of…
The goal of inverse self-assembly is to design inter-particle interactions capable of assembling the units into a desired target structure. The effective assembly of complex structures often requires the use of multiple components, each new…
Biomolecular condensates self-assemble when proteins and nucleic acids spontaneously demix to form droplets within the crowded intracellular milieu. This simple mechanism underlies the formation of a wide variety of membraneless…
Block copolymer melts offer a unique template to control the position and alignment of nanoparticles due to their ability to self-assemble into periodic ordered structures. Active Brownian particles are shown to co-assemble with block…
We study the self-assembly behaviour of patchy particles with `protein-like' interactions that can be considered as a minimal model for the assembly of viral capsids and other shell-like protein complexes. We thoroughly explore the…
In equilibrium, the collective behaviour of particles interacting via steep, short-ranged potentials is well captured by the virial expansion of the free energy at low density. Here, we extend this approach beyond equilibrium to the case of…
In equilibrium self-assembly, microscopic building blocks spontaneously self-organize into stable structures as dictated by their interaction potentials, which limits the accessible structural features to those that correspond to global…
Collective guidance of out-of-equilibrium systems without using external fields is a challenge of paramount importance in active matter, ranging from bacterial colonies to swarms of self-propelled particles. Designing strategies to guide…
Manipulating the way in which colloidal particles self-organise is a central challenge in the design of functional soft materials. Meeting this challenge requires the use of building blocks that interact with one another in a highly…
The emergence of structure through aggregation is a fascinating topic and of both fundamental and practical interest. Here we demonstrate that self-generated solvent flow can be used to generate long-range attractions on the colloidal…
Being intrinsically nonequilibrium, active materials can potentially perform functions that would be thermodynamically forbidden in passive materials. However, active systems have diverse local attractors that correspond to distinct…
Biological systems often involve the self-assembly of basic components into complex and function- ing structures. Artificial systems that mimic such processes can provide a well-controlled setting to explore the principles involved and also…