Related papers: Rotation and propulsion in 3d active chiral drople…

The motion of topological defects is an important feature of the dynamics of all liquid crystals, and is especially conspicuous in active liquid crystals. Understanding defect motion is a challenging theoretical problem, because the…

In living cells, molecular motors create activity that enhances the diffusion of particles throughout the cytoplasm, and not just ones attached to the motors. We demonstrate initial steps toward creating artificial cells that mimic this…

We study theoretically the chirality of a generic rigid object's sedimentation in a fluid under gravity in the low Reynolds number regime. We represent the object as a collection of small Stokes spheres or stokeslets, and the gravitational…

We present an analysis of the internal velocity structures of the newly identified sub-0.1 pc coherent structures, droplets, in L1688 and B18. By fitting 2D linear velocity fields to the observed maps of velocity centroids, we determine the…

Evaporating colloidal droplets have long been used as model systems to understand capillarity, interfacial transport, and particle assembly, most prominently through the coffee ring effect. In classical descriptions, suspended particles are…

There are many examples of driven and active matter systems containing particles that exhibit circular motion with different chiralities, such as swimming bacteria near surfaces or certain types of self-driven colloidal particles. Circular…

A simple model of an active colloid consisting of dumbbell-shaped particles that cyclically change their length without propelling themselves is proposed and analyzed. At nanoscales, it represents an idealization for bacterial cytoplasm or…

We explore the rheology and flow-induced morphological changes of cholesteric liquid crystal patterns subject to Poiseuille flow within a slab geometry, and under different anchoring conditions at the wall. Our focus is particularly on the…

We study experimentally and numerically the motion of a self-phoretic active particle in two-dimensional (2D) loosely-packed colloidal crystals at fluid interfaces. Two scenarios emerge depending on the interaction between the active…

Colloidal particles in a liquid crystal (LC) behave very differently from their counterparts in isotropic fluids. Elastic nature of the orientational order and surface anchoring of the director cause long-range anisotropic interactions and…

In inertial microfluidics lift forces cause a particle to migrate across streamlines to specific positions in the cross section of a microchannel. We control the rotational motion of a particle and demonstrate that this allows to manipulate…

Using computer simulations we investigate the microscopic structure of the singular director field within a nematic droplet. As a theoretical model for nematic liquid crystals we take hard spherocylinders. To induce an overall topological…

We develop a theory of point defects in cholesterics and textures in spherical droplets with normal anchoring. The local structure of chiral defects is described by singularity theory and a smectic-like gradient field establishing a nexus…

We report curling self-propulsion in aqueous emulsions of common mesogenic compounds. Nematic liquid crystal droplets self-propel in a surfactant solution with concentrations above the critical micelle concentration while undergoing…

Here we show that coupling to curvature has profound effects on collective motion in active systems, leading to patterns not observed in flat space. Biological examples of such active motion in curved environments are numerous: curvature…

Recent experiments have shown that liquid drops on highly deformable substrates exhibit mutual interactions. This is similar to the Cheerios effect, the capillary interaction of solid particles at a liquid interface, but now the roles of…

A paradigm for internally driven matter is the active nematic liquid crystal, whereby the equations of a conventional nematic are supplemented by a minimal active stress that violates time reversal symmetry. In practice, active fluids may…

Artificial soft matter systems have appeared as important tools to harness mechanical motion for microscale manipulation. Typically, this motion is driven either by the external fields or by mutual interaction between the colloids. In the…

In nature interactions between biopolymers and motor proteins give rise to biologically essential emergent behaviours. Besides cytoskeleton mechanics, active nematics arise from such interactions. Here we present a study on 3D active…

Studies of particle motion in vortical flows have mainly focused on point-like particles, either inertial or self-propelled. This approximation assumes that the velocity field that surrounds the particle is linear. We consider an…