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Hydrodynamic interactions driven by particle activity are ubiquitous in active colloidal systems. Although these interactions are strongly influenced by the interfacial actuation mechanism and geometry of the swimming particles, theoretical…
The spatiotemporal dynamics in systems of active self-propelled particles is controlled by the propulsion mechanism in combination with various direct interactions, such as steric repulsion, hydrodynamics, and chemical fields. Yet, these…
Biological microswimmers alter their motility in complex corner geometries, facilitating their survival. However, the dynamical features of low-Reynolds-number swimming at corners remain undefined. Here, we use active droplet microswimmers…
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…
Microswimmers are encountered in a wide variety of biophysical settings. When interacting with flow fields, they show interesting dynamical features such as trapping, clustering, and preferential orientation. One important step towards the…
The creation of synthetic systems that emulate the defining properties of living matter, such as motility, gradient-sensing, signalling and replication, is a grand challenge of biomimetics. Such imitations of life crucially contain active…
Actively propelled particles undergoing dissipative collisions are known to develop a state of spatially distributed coherently moving clusters. For densities larger than a characteristic value clusters grow in time and form a stationary…
Cooperative motion in biological microswimmers is crucial for their survival as it facilitates adhesion to surfaces, formation of hierarchical colonies, efficient motion, and enhanced access to nutrients. Synthetic microswimmers currently…
Shape anisotropy of individual building blocks plays a crucial role in creating exotic structures and controlling phase behavior in equilibrium systems. We present a combined experimental and simulation study in which we used light-driven…
Due to the combined effect of anisotropic interactions and activity, Janus swimmers are capable to self-assemble in a wide variety of structures, many more than their equilibrium counterpart. This might lead to the development of novel…
Particles with directional interactions are promising building blocks for new functional materials and may serve as models for biological structures. Mutually attractive nanoparticles that are deformable due to flexible surface groups, for…
Synthetic microswimmers mimicking biological movements at the microscale have been developed in recent years. Actuating helical magnetic materials with a homogeneous rotating magnetic field is one of the most widespread techniques for…
The mechanical, optical, and chemical properties of a wide variety of soft materials are enabled and constrained by their bulk structure. How this structure emerges at small system sizes during self-assembly has been the subject of decades…
Understanding and manipulating the interactions between foreign bodies and cell membranes during endo- and phagocytosis is of paramount importance, not only for the fate of living cells but also for numerous biomedical applications. This…
We study dynamics of clustering in systems containing active particles that are immersed in an explicit solvent. For this purpose we have adopted a hybrid simulation method, consisting of molecular dynamics and multi-particle collision…
Cooperation between micro-organisms give rise to novel phenomena like clustering, swarming in suspension. We study the collective behavior of the artificial swimmer called Taylor line at low Reynolds number using multi-particle collision…
A plethora of active matter models exist that describe the behavior of self-propelled particles (or swimmers), both with and without hydrodynamics. However, there are few studies that consider shape-anisotropic swimmers and include…
Nanometer-sized clusters are often targeted due to their potential applications as nanoreactors or storage/delivery devices. One route to assemble and stabilize finite structures consists in imparting directional bonding patterns between…
Creating materials with structure that is independently controllable at a range of scales requires breaking naturally occurring hierarchies. Breaking these hierarchies can be achieved via the decoupling of building block attributes from…
The ordering of rod-like particles in soft, deformable containers emerges from the interplay of anisotropic interactions, geometric confinement, and boundary compliance. This competition couples internal particle organization to container…