Related papers: Light-switchable propulsion of active particles wi…
Active colloids and liquid crystals are capable of locally converting the macroscopically-supplied energy into directional motion and promise a host of new applications, ranging from drug delivery to cargo transport at the mesoscale. Here…
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…
Active colloids are microscopic particles, which self-propel through viscous fluids by converting energy extracted from their environment into directed motion. We first explain how articial microswimmers move forward by generating…
We investigate experimentally the single-particle motion in water of silica colloidal beads half-coated with carbon under the action of a converging laser beam. The beads are self-propelled in this medium by means of self-thermophoresis…
The past two decades have seen a remarkable progress in the development of synthetic colloidal agents which are capable of creating directed motion in an unbiased environment at the microscale. These self-propelling particles are often…
Achieving controlled and directed motion of artificial nanoscale systems in three-dimensional fluid environments remains a key-challenge in active matter, primarily due to the prevailing thermal fluctuations that rapidly randomize the…
Depinning transitions occur when a threshold force must be applied to drive an otherwise immobile system. For the depinning of colloidal particles from a corrugated landscape, we show how active noise due to self-propulsion impacts the…
Active particles driven by a chemical reaction are the subject of intense research to date due to their rich physics, being intrinsically far from equilibrium, and their multiple technological applications. Recent attention in the field is…
Dynamic processes in dispersions of charged spherical particles are of importance both in fundamental science, and in technical and bio-medical applications. There exists a large variety of charged-particles systems, ranging from…
We study thermoelectric currents of neutral, fermionic atoms flowing through a mesoscopic channel connecting a hot and a cold reservoir across the superfluid transition. The thermoelectric response results from a competition between…
Collective guidance of out-of-equilibrium systems without using external fields is a challenge of paramount importance in active matter, ranging from bacterial colonies to swarms of self-propelled particles. Designing strategies to guide…
Recent experiments have shown that colloidal suspensions can spontaneously self-assemble into dense clusters of various internal structures, sizes and dynamical properties when doped with active Janus particles. Characteristically, these…
Phototaxis is a light driven self-locomotion of mass and a common phenomenon in motile organisms with varieties of motility such as in bacteria, algae, etc. In naturally occurring organisms, mechanical force is generated utilising their…
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…
Gold-capped Janus particles immersed in a near-critical binary mixture can be propelled using illumination. We employ a non-isothermal diffuse interface approach to investigate the self-propulsion mechanism of a single colloid. We attribute…
Self-propelled colloidal objects, such as motile bacteria or synthetic microswimmers, have microscopically irreversible individual dynamics - a feature they share with all living systems. The incoherent behaviour of individual swimmers can…
Photons carrying non-zero orbital angular momentum (twisted photons) are well-known in optics. Recently, it was suggested to use Compton backscattering to boost optical twisted photons to high energies. Twisted electrons in the intermediate…
Twisted light (TL), a special kind of light carrying orbital angular momentum, provides a powerful tool for driving symmetry resolved transitions in quantum confined nanostructures. We study a realistic model where a TL pulse excites two…
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…
Many active particles, both of biological and synthetic origin, can have a light controllable propulsion speed, a property that in biology is commonly referred to as photokinesis. Here we investigate directed transport of photokinetic…