Related papers: Reconfigurable Artificial Microswimmers with Inter…
Intelligent metamaterials have attracted widespread research interest due to their self-adaptive capabilities and controllability. They hold great potential for advancing fluid control by providing responsive and flexible solutions.…
Microrobots show great potential in biomedical applications such as drug delivery and cell manipulations. However, current microrobots are mostly fabricated as a single entity and type and the tasks they can perform are limited. In this…
The backswimmer fly is an aquatic insect, capable of regulating its buoyancy underwater. Its abdomen is covered with hemoglobin cells, used to bind and release oxygen, reversibly. Upon entering water, the fly entraps an air bubble in a…
Field induced assembly of reconfigurable structures with complex hierarchical configurations has recently become an area of intense research with the promise for exciting applications in programmable self-assembly and nano/microstructure…
Microorganisms can preferentially orient and move along gradients of a chemo-attractant (i.e., chemotax) while colonies of many microorganisms can collectively undergo complex dynamics in response to chemo-attractants that they themselves…
We describe size-varying cylindrical particles made from silicone elastomers that can serve as building blocks for robotic granular materials. The particle size variation, which is achieved by inflation, gives rise to changes in stiffness…
Both natural and artificial small-scale swimmers may often self-propel in environments subject to complex geometrical constraints. While most past theoretical work on low-Reynolds number locomotion addressed idealised geometrical…
Self-assembly in natural and synthetic molecular systems can create complex aggregates or materials whose properties and functionality rises from their internal structure and molecular arrangement. The key microscopic features that control…
Ionic microgel particles are intriguing systems in which the properties of thermo-responsive polymeric colloids are enriched by the presence of charged groups. In order to rationalize their properties and predict the behaviour of microgel…
Unlike macroscopic swimmers, microswimmers operate in a low-Reynolds-number regime dominated by viscous forces. This paper investigates the controllability of a magnetic microswimmer composed of a spherical magnetic head and an elastic,…
Artificial bacteria flagella (ABFs) are magnetic helical micro-swimmers that can be remotely controlled via a uniform, rotating magnetic field. Previous studies have used the heterogeneous response of microswimmers to external magnetic…
The transport of motile entities across modulated energy landscapes plays an important role in a range of phenomena in biology, colloidal science and solid-state physics. Here, an easily implementable strategy that allows for the collective…
Self-propelled micron-size particles suspended in a fluid, like bacteria or synthetic microswimmers, are strongly non-equilibrium systems where particle motility breaks the microscopic detailed balance, often resulting in large-scale…
Chiral active particles are able to draw energy from the environment to self-propel in the form of rotation. We describe an experimental arrangement wherein chiral objects, spinners, floating on the surface of a vibrated fluid rotate due to…
In equilibrium, colloidal suspensions governed by short-range attractive and long-range repulsive interactions form thermodynamically stable clusters. Using Brownian dynamics computer simulations, we investigate how this equilibrium…
We theoretically describe the dynamics of swimmer populations confined in thin liquid films. We first demonstrate that hydrodynamic interactions between confined swimmers only depend on their shape and are independent of their specific…
Development of artificial materials exhibiting unusual optical properties is one of the major strands of current photonics research. Of particular interest are soft-matter systems reconfigurable by external stimuli that play an important…
Guiding active microswimmers by external fields to requested target locations is a promising strategy to realize complex transport on the microscale. To this end, one possibility consists of attaching the microswimmers to orientable passive…
We study both experimentally and theoretically the self-assembly of binary block copolymers in dilute solution, where self-assembly is triggered by changing the solvent from the common good solvent THF to the selective solvent water, and…
In analogy to nanoscopic molecules that are composed of individual atoms, we consider an active "microswimmer molecule". It is built up from three individual magnetic colloidal microswimmers that are connected by harmonic springs and…