Related papers: Chemotactic self-caging in active emulsions

Droplets form a cornerstone of the spatiotemporal organization of biomolecules in cells. These droplets are controlled using physical processes like chemical reactions and imposed gradients, which are costly to simulate using traditional…

The emerging collective motions of swarms of interacting agents are a subject of great interest in application areas ranging from biology to physics and robotics. In this paper, we conduct a careful analysis of the collective dynamics of a…

Emergent communication in artificial agents has been studied to understand language evolution, as well as to develop artificial systems that learn to communicate with humans. We show that agents performing a cooperative navigation task in…

Active forces occurring within cells can drive crucial biological processes that involve spontaneous organization and shape change, such as cell division. Motivated by recent in vitro experiments of nematic droplets of cytoskeletal…

Chemical communication, response, and feedback are key requirements for the function of adaptive materials with life-like properties. However, how communication on the single cell-level impacts the collective structural, dynamical and…

Ciliated microswimmers and flagellated bacteria alter their swimming trajectories to follow the direction of an applied electric field exhibiting electrotaxis. Both for matters of application and physical modelling, it is instructive to…

Active droplets swim as a result of the nonlinear advective coupling of the distribution of chemical species they consume or release with the Marangoni flows created by their non-uniform surface distribution. Most existing models focus on…

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…

Self-propelled active particles exhibit delayed responses to environmental changes, modulating their propulsion speed through intrinsic sensing and feedback mechanisms. This adaptive behavior fundamentally determines their dynamics and…

Self-organization phenomena in ensembles of self-propelled particles open pathways to the synthesis of new dynamic states not accessible by traditional equilibrium processes. The challenge is to develop a set of principles that facilitate…

Mechanochemical processes on surfaces such as the cellular cortex or epithelial sheets, play a key role in determining patterns and shape changes of biological systems. To understand the complex interplay of hydrodynamics and material flows…

Active matter comprised of self-propelled interacting units holds a major promise for extraction of useful work from its seemingly chaotic out-of-equilibrium dynamics. Streamlining active matter to produce work is especially important at…

Self-propulsion and navigation due to the sensing of environmental conditions - such as durotaxis and chemotaxis - are remarkable properties of biological cells that cannot be reproduced by single-component self-propelled particles. We…

Engineering synthetic materials that mimic the remarkable complexity of living organisms is a fundamental challenge in science and technology. We study the spatiotemporal patterns that emerge when an active nematicfilm of microtubules and…

The evolutionary balance between innate and learned behaviors is highly intricate, and different organisms have found different solutions to this problem. We hypothesize that the emergence and exact form of learning behaviors is naturally…

Organisms often swim through fluids that are spatially inhomogeneous. If the fluids are polymeric, gradients in polymer concentration may lead to gradients in both fluid viscosity and elasticity. In this letter, we present theoretical…

The self-organization of active particles is governed by their dynamic effective interactions. Such interactions are controlled by the medium in which such active agents reside. Here, we study the interactions between active agents in a…

Similarly to their biological counterparts, suspensions of chemically-active autophoretic swimmers exhibit nontrivial dynamics involving self-organization processes as a result of inter-particle interactions. Using a kinetic model for a…

Chemically active colloids or enzymes cluster into dense droplets driven by their phoretic response to collectively generated chemical gradients. Employing Brownian dynamics simulation techniques, our study of the dynamics of such a…

We numerically investigate the motion of active artificial microswimmers diffusing in a fuel concentration gradient. We observe that, in the steady state, their probability density accumulates in the low-concentration regions, whereas a…