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The design of artificial microswimmers is often inspired by the strategies of natural microorganisms. Many of these creatures exploit the fact that elasticity breaks the time-reversal symmetry of motion at low Reynolds numbers, but this…
We report spontaneous motion in a fully bio-compatible system consisting of pure water droplets in an oil-surfactant medium of squalane and monoolein. Water from the droplet is solubilized by the reverse micellar solution, creating a…
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…
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…
We report the first experimental realization of a chiral artificial microswimmer exhibiting the helical motion. We found that a cholesteric liquid crystal droplet with a helical director field swims in a helical path driven by the Marangoni…
Active drops emit/absorb chemical solutes, whose concentration gradients cause interfacial flows driving their own transport and the propulsion of the droplet. Such non-linear coupling enables active drops to achieve directed…
We experimentally study the motion of light-activated colloidal microswimmers in a viscoelastic fluid. We find that, in such a non-Newtonian environment, the active colloids undergo an unexpected transition from enhanced angular diffusion…
The swimming of cells, far from any boundary, can arise in the absence of long-range liquid-crystalline order within the cytoplasm, but simple models of this effect are lacking. Here we present a two-dimensional model of droplet…
To explore and react to their environment, living micro-swimmers have developed sophisticated strategies for locomotion - in particular, motility with multiple gaits. To understand the physical principles associated with such a behavioural…
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 fluids are a class of non-equilibrium systems where energy is injected into the system continuously by the constituent particles themselves. Many examples, such as bacterial suspensions and actomyosin networks, are intrinsically…
We report on a switchable emulsion droplet microswimmer by utilizing a temperature-dependent transition of the droplet phase. The droplets, made from a liquid crystalline (LC) smectic phase material ($T =$ 25 $^{\circ}$C), self-propel only…
Ordered phases emerged in active suspensions of polar swimmers are under long-wavelength hydrodynamic mediated instabilities. In this letter, we show that chemical molecules dissolved in aqueous suspensions, as an unavoidable part of most…
Recent findings of possible applications of bio-friendly synthetic self-phoretic swimmers, have motivated the researchers in investigating the various motion-generating mechanisms to optimize the operating characteristics of the same. In…
Active colloids self-organise to a variety of collective states, ranging from highly motile 'molecules' to complex 3D structures. Using large-scale simulations, we show that hydrodynamic interactions, together with a gravity-like aligning…
Typical bodily and environmental fluids encountered by biological swimmers consist of dissolved macromolecules such as proteins and polymers, often rendering them non Newtonian. To mimic such scenarios, we investigate the motion of swimming…
Recently, there is much interest in droplet condensation on soft or liquid/liquid-like substrates. Droplets can deform soft and liquid interfaces resulting in a wealth of phenomena not observed on hard, solid surfaces (e.g., increased…
We investigate the reliability of simulations of polyelectrolyte systems in aqueous environments, simulations that are performed using an efficient multi scale coarse grained polarizable pseudo-particle particle approach, denoted as pppl,…
Electrolyte solutions play critical role in a vast range of important applications, yet an accurate and scalable method of predicting their properties without fitting to experiment has remained out of reach, despite over a century of…
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…