Related papers: Light-controlled Assembly of Active Colloidal Mole…
Particles with directional interactions are promising building blocks for new functional materials and may serve as models for biological structures. Mutually attractive nanoparticles that are deformable due to flexible surface groups, for…
External fields can decidedly alter the free energy landscape of soft materials and can be exploited as a powerful tool for the assembly of targeted nanostructures and colloidal materials. Here, we use computer simulations to demonstrate…
Active particles such as swimming bacteria or self-propelled colloids are known to spontaneously organize into fascinating large-scale dynamic structures. The emergence of these collective states from the motility pattern of the individual…
Active matter has been intensely studied for its wealth of intriguing properties such as collective motion, motility-induced phase separation (MIPS), and giant fluctuations away from criticality. However, the precise connection of active…
Active matter exhibits striking behaviour reminiscent of living matter and molecular fluids, and has promising applications in drug delivery or mixing at the micron scale. Active colloidal systems provide important models with simple and…
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…
A mixture of particles with perception-dependent motility and opposite misaligned visual perception shows to spontaneously self-organize into a self-propelling bean-shaped cluster. The two species initially rotate in opposite directions,…
Extreme active matter, an assembly of self-propelled particles with large persistence time $\tau_p$ and high P\'eclet number, exhibits remarkable behaviour at high densities. As $\tau_p\to 0$, the assembly undergoes a gradual slowing down…
The field of synthetic active matter has, thus far, been led by efforts to create point-like, isolated (yet interacting) self-propelled objects (\emph{e.g.} colloids, droplets, microrobots) and understanding their collective dynamics. The…
If particles interact according to isotropic pair potentials that favor multiple length scales, in principle a large variety of different complex structures can be achieved by self-assembly. We present, motivate, and discuss a conjecture…
Motivated by recent experiments on colloidal systems with competing attractive and repulsive interactions, we simulate a two-dimensional system of colloids with competing interactions that can undergo fragmentation. In the absence of any…
Self-powered motion in catalytic colloidal particles provides a compelling example of active matter, i.e. systems that engage in single-particle and collective behavior far from equilibrium. The long-time, long-distance behavior of such…
Emergent behaviors occur in a vast array of systems across many scales, and are of fundamental physical importance because of the intrinsic difficulty in linking microscopic system properties to macroscopic behaviors. Here we study the…
We use moving light patterns to control the motion of {\it Escherichia coli} bacteria whose motility is photo-activated. Varying the pattern speed controls the magnitude and direction of the bacterial flux, and therefore the accumulation of…
In many biological systems, the curvature of the surfaces cells live on influence their collective properties. Curvature should likewise influence the behavior of active colloidal particles. We show using molecular simulation of…
Self-assembly is one of the crucial mechanisms allowing to design multifunctional materials. Soft hybrid materials contain components of different nature and exhibit competitive interactions which drive self-organisation into structures of…
The self-assembly of metallic colloidal clusters (so called plasmonic metamolecules) has been viewed as a versatile, but highly effective approach for the materialization of the metamaterials exhibiting artificial magnetism at optical…
Active solids such as cell collectives, colloidal clusters, and active metamaterials exhibit diverse collective phenomena, ranging from rigid body motion to shape-changing mechanisms. The nonlinear dynamics of such active materials remains…
Colloidal building blocks with re-configurable shapes and dynamic interactions can exhibit unusual self-assembly behaviors and pathways. In this work, we consider the phase behavior of colloids coated with surface-mobile polymer brushes…
We outline a basic strategy of how self-propulsion can be used to improve the yield of a typical colloidal self-assembly process. The success of this approach is predicated on the thoughtful design of the colloidal building block as well as…