Related papers: Light-responsive active particles in a thermotropi…
While active systems possess notable potential to form the foundation of new classes of autonomous materials, designing systems that can extract functional work from active surroundings has proven challenging. In this work, we extend these…
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…
Recent advancements in active colloidal systems aim to mimic key characteristics of biological microswimmers, particularly their adaptive motility in response to environmental changes. While many approaches rely on externally imposing a…
Active media, whose constituents are able to move autonomously, display novel features that differ from those of equilibrium systems. In addition to naturally-occurring active systems such as populations of swimming bacteria, active systems…
A mesoscopic hydrodynamic model to simulate synthetic self-propelled Janus particles which is thermophoretically or diffusiophoretically driven is here developed. We first propose a model for a passive colloidal sphere which reproduces the…
The ability to optically trap and manipulate artificial microswimmers such as active Janus particles (JPs) provides a breakthrough in active matter research and applications. However, it presents significant challenges because of the…
Janus colloids propelled by light, e.g., thermophoretic particles, offer promising prospects as artificial microswimmers. However, their swimming behavior and its dependence on fluid properties and fluid-colloid interactions remain poorly…
Janus particles are special types of nano or micro particles possessing at least two surfaces with distinct physical or chemical properties. The most studied Janus particles are the metal-dielectric particles, in which half surface of…
It has been shown that an anisotropic liquid crystalline (LC) environment can be used to guide the self-propulsion dynamics of dispersed microswimmers, such as bacteria. This type of composite system is named "living nematic" (LN). In the…
We study electrophoretic mobility of metal-dielectric Janus particles with dipolar director profile in two nematic liquid crystals (LCs) having same (positive) conductivity anisotropy and opposite dielectric anisotropy. The applied ac…
The ability to design artificial micro/nanomachines able to perform sophisticated tasks crucially depends on the understanding of their interaction with biosystems and their compatibility with the biological environment. Here, Janus…
We experimentally investigate active motion of spherical Janus colloidal particles in a viscoelastic fluid. Self-propulsion is achieved by a local concentration gradient of a critical polymer mixture which is imposed by laser illumination.…
Chemically active Janus particles generate tangential concentration gradients along their surface for self-propulsion. Although this is well studied in unbounded domains, the analysis in biologically relevant environments such as…
The interactions of autonomous microswimmers play an important role for the formation of collective states of motile active matter. We study them in detail for the common microswimmer-design of two-faced Janus spheres with hemispheres made…
The generation of fluid flows by autophoretic microswimmers has been proposed as a mechanism to enhance mass transport and mixing at the micro- and nanoscale. Here, we experimentally investigate the ability of model 2-D "active baths" of…
The locomotion and design of microswimmers are topical issues of current fundamental and applied research. In addition to numerous living and artificial active microswimmers, a passive microswimmer was identified only recently: a soft,…
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…
We explore the diffusion dynamics of a Brownian microparticle in a lyotropic chromonic liquid crystal (LCLC). In the planarly oriented nematic phase, the microparticle exhibits levitation and anisotropic two-dimensional diffusion. Upon…
Motile liquid crystal (LC) colloids show peculiar behavior due to the high sensitivity to external stimuli driven by the LC elastic and surface effects. However, few studies focus on harnessing the LC phase transitions to propel colloidal…
Collective motion of self-propelled organisms or synthetic particles often termed active fluid has attracted enormous attention in broad scientific community because of it fundamentally non-equilibrium nature. Energy input and interactions…