Related papers: Tractionless Self-Propulsion of Active Drops
Ambient air cushions the impact of drops on solid substrates, an effect usually revealed by the entrainment of a bubble, trapped as the air squeezed under the drop drains and liquid-solid contact occurs. The presence of air becomes evident…
Contrasting with its sluggish behavior on standard solids, water is extremely mobile on superhydrophobic materials, as shown for instance by the continuous acceleration of drops on tilted water-repellent leaves. For much longer substrates,…
We report a novel form of convection in suspensions of the bioluminiscent marine bacterium $Photobacterium~phosphoreum$. Suspensions of these bacteria placed in a chamber open to the air create persistent luminiscent plumes most easily…
Active emulsions and liquid crystalline shells are intriguing and experimentally realisable types of topological matter. Here we numerically study the morphology and spatiotemporal dynamics of a double emulsion, where one or two passive…
While active systems possess notable potential to form the foundation of new classes of autonomous materials, designing systems that can extract functional work from active surroundings has proven challenging. In this work, we extend these…
Motivated by the motion of nematode sperm cells, we present a model for the motion of an adhesive gel on a solid substrate. The gel polymerizes at the leading edge and depolymerizes at the rear. The motion results from a competition between…
Active transport of biomolecular condensates and cell migration in collectives are fundamental to development, homeostasis, and processes such as cancer progression, wound healing, and infection response. Yet how these assemblies are…
With exquisite precision and reproducibility, cells orchestrate the cooperative action of thousands of nanometer-sized molecular motors to carry out mechanical tasks at much larger length scales, such as cell motility, division and…
We propose a mechanism of cell motility which is based on contraction and does not require protrusion. The contraction driven translocation of a cell is due to internal flow of the cytoskeleton generated by molecular motors. Each motor…
We stabilize nematic droplets with handles against surface-tension-driven instabilities using a yield-stress material as outer fluid and study the complex nematic textures and defect structures that result from the competition between…
The diffusion of active microscopic organisms in complex environments plays an important role in a wide range of biological phenomena from cell colony growth to single organism transport. Here, we investigate theoretically and…
Suspensions of swimming micro-organisms provide examples of coordinated active dynamics. That has stimulated the study of a phenomenological theory combining synchronization and polar order in active matter. Here, we consider another…
Experimental observations indicate that chemically active droplets suspended in a surfactant-laden fluid can self-propel spontaneously. The onset of this motion is attributed to a symmetry-breaking Marangoni instability resulting from the…
Nano-patterned substrates offer possibilities for controlling the motion of fluids without external energy supply in novel technologies in microfluidics, coatings, etc. Here, we report on the rugotaxial motion of droplets on wrinkled…
We experimentally study the detachment of drops of granular suspensions using a density matched model suspension with varying volume fraction ({\phi} = 15% to 55%) and grain diameter (d = 20 {\mu}m to 140 {\mu}m). We show that at the…
Liquid drops on soft solids generate strong deformations below the contact line, resulting from a balance of capillary and elastic forces. The movement of these drops may cause strong, potentially singular dissipation in the soft solid.…
We show from experiments and simulations on vibration-activated granular matter that self-propelled polar rods in an elastic medium on a substrate turn and move towards each other. We account for this effective attraction through a…
Inspired by recent experiments of cells accumulating on anisotropic substrates, we study a two-dimensional, compressible, isotropic, active fluid in the presence of anisotropic friction. We find that regions of anisotropic friction that are…
We study in this work a steady shearing laminar flow with null heat flux (usually called "uniform shear flow") in a gas-solid suspension at low density. The solid particles are modeled as a gas of smooth hard spheres with inelastic…
Soft materials are ubiquitous in technological applications that require deformability, for instance, in flexible, water-repellent coatings. However, the wetting properties of pre-strained soft materials are only beginning to be explored.…