Related papers: Dynamic control of active droplets using light-res…
Electrically-controlled dynamics of fluids and particles at microscales is a fascinating area of research with applications ranging from microfluidics and sensing to sorting of biomolecules. The driving mechanisms are electric forces acting…
Many active particles, both of biological and synthetic origin, can have a light controllable propulsion speed, a property that in biology is commonly referred to as photokinesis. Here we investigate directed transport of photokinetic…
Evaporating colloidal droplets have long been used as model systems to understand capillarity, interfacial transport, and particle assembly, most prominently through the coffee ring effect. In classical descriptions, suspended particles are…
How thousands of microtubules and molecular motors self-organize into spindles remains poorly understood. By combining static, nanometer-resolution, large-scale electron tomography reconstructions and dynamic, optical-resolution, polarized…
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 consider sedimented at a solid wall particles that are immersed in water containing small additives of photosensitive ionic surfactants. It is shown that illumination with an appropriate wavelength, a beam intensity profile, shape and…
We study experimentally and numerically the motion of a self-phoretic active particle in two-dimensional (2D) loosely-packed colloidal crystals at fluid interfaces. Two scenarios emerge depending on the interaction between the active…
We study theoretically the hydrodynamics of a fluid drop containing oriented filaments endowed with active contractile or extensile stresses and placed on a solid surface. The active stresses alter qualitatively the wetting properties of…
We propose a theoretical framework to dynamically control the degree of polarization of light by using the superposition of incoherent orthogonally polarized beams in a Mach-Zehnder interferometer incorporating a twisted nematic liquid…
Switchable and adaptive substrates emerged as valuable tools for the control of wetting and actuation of droplet motion. Here we report a computational study of the dynamics of an unstable thin liquid film deposited on a switchable…
We numerically study the dynamics of two-dimensional blue phases in active chiral liquid crystals. We show that introducing contractile activity results in stabilised blue phases, while small extensile activity generates ordered but dynamic…
Understanding and controlling the director field configuration, shape, and orientation in nematic and cholesteric liquid crystals is of fundamental importance in several branches of science. Liquid crystalline droplets, also known as…
A common feature of biological self-organization is how active agents communicate with each other or their environment via chemical signaling. Such communications, mediated by self-generated chemical gradients, have consequences for both…
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…
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…
A paradigm for internally driven matter is the active nematic liquid crystal, whereby the equations of a conventional nematic are supplemented by a minimal active stress that violates time reversal symmetry. In practice, active fluids may…
Optical tweezers are a versatile tool that can be used to manipulate small particles including both motile and non-motile bacteria and cells. The orientation of a non-spherical particle within a beam depends on the shape of the particle and…
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…
Bacteria such as Escherichia coli (E. coli) exhibit biased motion if kept in a spatially non-uniform chemical environment. Here, we bring out unique time-dependent characteristics of bacterial chemotaxis, in response to a diffusing spatial…
We investigate configuration dynamics of a flexible polymer chain in a bath of active particles with dynamic chirality, i.e., particles rotate with a deterministic angular velocity $\omega$ besides self-propulsion,by Langevin dynamics…