Related papers: Light-controlled Assembly of Active Colloidal Mole…
Chemically active droplets provide simple models for cell-like systems that can grow and divide. Such active droplet systems are driven away from thermodynamic equilibrium and turn over chemically, which corresponds to a simple metabolism.…
Colloidal molecules are ideal model systems for mimicking real molecules and can serve as versatile building blocks for the bottom-up self-assembly of flexible and smart materials. While most colloidal molecules are rigid objects, the…
Active systems, from bacterial suspensions to cellular monolayers, are continuously driven out of equilibrium by local injection of energy from their constituent elements and exhibit turbulent-like and chaotic patterns. Here we demonstrate…
Phase separation in passive systems leads to uncontrolled droplet growth, limiting structural control in soft materials and cells. We identify a generic mechanism to arrest coarsening based on chemical interconversion between molecular…
Actuation remains a signifcant challenge in soft robotics. Actuation by light has important advantages: objects can be actuated from a distance, distinct frequencies can be used to actuate and control distinct modes with minimal…
Light carries energy and momentum. It can therefore alter the motion of objects from atomic to astronomical scales. Being widely available, readily controllable and broadly biocompatible, light is also an ideal tool to propel microscopic…
External control of the swimming speed of `active particles' can be used to self assemble designer structures in situ on the micrometer to millimeter scale. We demonstrate such reconfigurable templated active self assembly in a fluid…
Extreme deformation of soft matter is central to our understanding of the effects of shock, fracture, and phase change in a variety of systems. Yet, despite, the increasing interest in this area, far-from-equilibrium behaviours of soft…
The interaction between a flexible polymer in good solvent and smaller associating solute molecules such as amphiphiles (surfactants) is considered theoretically. Attractive correlations, induced in the polymer because of the interaction,…
Active matter systems evade the constraints of thermal equilibrium, leading to the emergence of intriguing collective behavior. A paradigmatic example is given by motor-filament mixtures, where the motion of motor proteins drives alignment…
Colloids self-assemble into various organized superstructures determined by particle interactions. There is a tremendous progress in both the scientific understanding and applications of self-assemblies of single-type identical particles.…
Recent advances in the field of active soft matter promise a lot. Both, experimental advances and theoretical understanding point towards new material classes in reach, for example self-healing materials that might switch their properties…
Understanding the out-of-equilibrium properties of noisy microscale systems and the extent to which they can be modulated externally, is a crucial scientific and technological challenge. It holds the promise to unlock disruptive new…
During the last 3 years, our group has investigated extensively the complexation mechanism between neutral-polyelectrolyte block copolymers with oppositely charged species. These species are surfactant micelles, multivalent counterions and…
The process of self-assembly is guided by the minimization of free energy, which limits the symmetries available for assembly and ultimately the usefulness of devices fabricated in this fashion. Here, we demonstrate experimentally for the…
We study numerically the phases and dynamics of a dense collection of self-propelled particles with soft repulsive interactions in two dimensions. The model is motivated by recent in vitro experiments on confluent monolayers of migratory…
The precise control of complex reactions is critical for biological processes yet our inability to design for specific outcomes limits the development of synthetic analogues. Here, we leverage differentiable simulators to design nontrivial…
An optimal control strategy is developed to construct nanostructures of desired geometry along line segments by means of directed self-assembly of charged particles. Such a control strategy determines the electric potentials of a set of…
A hallmark of living systems is the ability to employ a common set of versatile building blocks that can self-organize into a multitude of different structures, in a way that can be controlled with minimal cost. This capability can only be…
We consider a rigid assembly of two active Brownian particles, forming an active colloidal dimer, in a gradient of activity. We show analytically that depending on the relative orientation of the two particles the active dimer accumulates…