Related papers: Optically enriched and guided dynamics of active s…

I put forward a continuum theory for active nematic gels, defined as fluids or suspensions of orientable rodlike objects endowed with active dynamics, that is based on symmetry arguments and compatibility with thermodynamics. The starting…

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…

We study the universal behavior of a class of active colloids whose design is inspired by the collective dynamics of natural systems like schools of fish and flocks of birds. These colloids, with off-center repulsive interaction sites,…

We study a crystal composed of active units governed by self-alignment and chirality. The first mechanism acts as an effective torque that aligns the particle orientation with its velocity, while the second drives individual particles along…

Controlling fluidic flows in active droplets is crucial in developing intelligent models to understand and mimic single-celled microorganisms. Typically, these fluidic flows are affected by the interfacial dynamics of chemical agents. We…

We study experimentally and theoretically discrete solitons in crystalline structures consisting of several tens of laser-cooled ions confined in a radiofrequency trap. Resonantly exciting localized, spectrally gapped vibrational modes of…

At high pressure, the typical behavior of elements dictated by the periodic table - including oxidation numbers, stoichiometries in compounds, and reactivity, to name but a few - is altered dramatically. As pressure is applied, the…

In ferromagnetic multilayers, a single laser pulse with a fluence above an optical nucleation threshold can create magnetic skyrmions, which are randomly distributed over the area of the laser spot. However, in order to study the dynamics…

Nematic liquid-crystal devices are a powerful tool to structure light in different degrees of freedom, both in classical and quantum regimes. Most of these devices exploit either the possibility of introducing a position-dependent phase…

Optical activity, the power of a medium to rotate the polarization of a light beam, has contributed significantly to molecular structure assessments in stereochemistry, biomolecular science and crystallography. Thus far, it is commonly…

We present nonlinear dynamic equations for nematic and smectic $A$ liquid crystals in the presence of an alternating electric field and explain their derivation in detail. The local electric field acting in any liquid-crystalline system is…

Motivated by recent experimental results that reveal rich collective dynamics of thousands-to-millions of active liquid crystal skyrmions we have developed a coarse grained particle-based model of the dynamics of skyrmions in dilute regime.…

Skyrmions, topologically protected textures, have been observed in different fields of nanotechnology and have emerged as promising candidates for different applications due to their topological stability, low-power operation, and dynamic…

The coupling of active, self-motile particles to topological constraints can give rise to novel non-equilibrium dynamical patterns that lack any passive counterpart. Here we study the behavior of self-propelled rods confined to a compact…

We introduce a novel type of self-bound droplet which carries an emergent color charge. We consider a system of particles hopping on a lattice and interacting via a commensurately sign-changing potential which is attractive at a short…

Colloids are abundant in nature, science and technology, with examples ranging from milk to quantum dots and the "colloidal atom" paradigm. Similarly, liquid crystal ordering is important in contexts ranging from biological membranes to…

Optomechanics, the study of the mechanical interaction of light with matter, has proven to be a fruitful area of research that has yielded many notable achievements, including the direct detection of gravitational waves in kilometer-scale…

Here we propose the use of an adjustable liquid crystal spin-orbit device to shape bi-colour structured light to create bimodal states. We demonstrate the proof-of-principle for two individual wavelengths in a nonlinear optics framework.…

Plasmonic Optical matter (OM), composed of optically bound metallic particles, can be rotated by transferring the spin angular momentum (SAM) of chiral light to the assembly. Rotating OM is a promising platform for optical micromachines,…

Controlled movement of nano-scale stable magnetic objects has been proposed as the foundation for a new generation of magnetic storage devices. Magnetic skyrmions, vortex-like spin textures stabilized by their topology are particularly…