Related papers: Self-propulsion of chemically-active droplets

Complex interactions between cellular systems and their surrounding extracellular matrices are emerging as important mechanical regulators of cell functions such as proliferation, motility, and cell death, and such cellular systems are…

The field of synthetic active matter has, thus far, been led by efforts to create point-like, isolated (yet interacting) self-propelled objects (\emph{e.g.} colloids, droplets, microrobots) and understanding their collective dynamics. The…

Self-diffusiophoretic particles exploit local concentration gradients of a solute species in order to self-propel at the micron scale. While an isolated chemically- and geometrically-isotropic particle cannot swim, we show that it can…

Biological microswimmers are known to navigate upstream of an external flow (positive rheotaxis) in trajectories ranging from linear, spiral to oscillatory. Such rheotaxis stems from the interplay between the motion and complex shapes of…

Active processes drive and guide biological dynamics across scales -- from subcellular cytoskeletal remodelling, through tissue development in embryogenesis, to population-level bacterial colonies expansion. In each of these, biological…

Differently from passive Brownian particles, active particles, also known as self-propelled Brownian particles or microswimmers and nanoswimmers, are capable of taking up energy from their environment and converting it into directed motion.…

We study theoretically the self-propulsion dynamics of a small droplet on general curved surfaces by a variational approach. A new reduced model is derived based on careful computations for the capillary energy and the viscous dissipation…

Phoretic mechanisms, whereby gradients of chemical solutes induce surface-driven flows, have recently been used to generate directed propulsion of patterned colloidal particles. When the chemical solutes diffuse slowly, an instability…

We numerically study the dynamics of a passive fluid droplet confined within a microchannel whose walls are covered with a thin layer of active gel. The latter represents a fluid of extensile material modelling, for example, a suspension of…

Inspired by the observation of intricate and beautifully dynamic patterns generated by food coloring on clean glass slides, we have investigated the behavior of propylene glycol and water droplets on high energy surfaces. In this fluid…

Spontaneous motion of an oil droplet driven by chemical nonequilibricity is reported. It is shown that the droplet undergoes regular rhythmic motion under appropriately designed boundary conditions, whereas it exhibits random motion in an…

Active droplets are artificial microswimmers built from a liquid dispersion by microfluidic tools and showing self-propelled motion. These systems hold particular interest for mimicking biological phenomena, such as some aspects of cell…

We report the generation of directed self-propelled motion of a droplet of aniline oil with a velocity on the order of centimeters per second on an aqueous phase. It is found that, depending on the initial conditions, the droplet shows…

The motion of an artificial micro-scale swimmer that uses a chemical reaction catalyzed on its own surface to achieve autonomous propulsion is fully characterized experimentally. It is shown that at short times, it has a substantial…

Marangoni self-contracted droplets are formed by a mixture of two liquids, one of larger surface tension and larger evaporation rate than the other. Due to evaporation, the droplets contract to a stable contact angle instead of spreading on…

Spontaneous rotation of a droplet induced by the Marangoni flow is analyzed in a two-dimensional system. The droplet with the small particle which supplies a surfactant at the interface is considered. We calculated flow field around the…

We report on the emergence of spontaneously rotating clusters in active emulsions. Ensembles of self-propelling droplets sediment and then self-organise into planar, hexagonally ordered clusters which hover over the container bottom while…

The Marangoni effect refers to fluid flow induced by a gradient in surface tension at a fluid-fluid interface. We determine the full three-dimensional Marangoni flow generated by a non-uniform surface tension profile at the interface of a…

The acoustofluidic method holds great promise for manipulating microorganisms. When exposed to the steady vortex structures of acoustic streaming flow, these microorganisms exhibit intriguing dynamic behaviors, such as hydrodynamic trapping…

For monolayers of chemically active particles at a fluid interface, collective dynamics are predicted to arise owing to activity-induced Marangoni flow even if the particles are not self-propelled. Here we test this prediction by employing…