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Centipedes exhibit great maneuverability in diverse environments due to their many legs and body-driven control. By leveraging similar morphologies and control strategies, their robotic counterparts also demonstrate effective terrestrial…
We introduce a new class of optical micromotors driven by the spin-orbit interaction of light and spin-driven fluid flows leading to simultaneous rotation and revolution of the micromotors. The micromotors are essentially birefringent…
Microengines have shown promise for a variety of applications in nanotechnology, microfluidics and nanomedicine, including targeted drug delivery, microscale pumping, and environmental remediation. However, achieving precise control over…
Liquid transport in microchip-based systems is important in many areas such as Laboratory-on-a-chip, Microfluidics and Optofluidics. Actuation of liquids in such systems is usually achieved using either mechanical displacement11 or via…
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 systems of self-propelled agents, e.g., birds, fish, and bacteria, can organize their collective motion into myriad autonomous behaviors. Ubiquitous in nature and across length scales, such phenomena are also amenable to artificial…
Optomechanical systems offer one of the most sensitive methods for detecting mechanical motion using shifts in the optical resonance frequency of the optomechanical resonator . Presently, these systems are used for measuring mechanical…
Achieving quantum-limited motional control of optically trapped particles beyond the sub-micrometer scale is an outstanding problem in levitated optomechanics. A key obstacle is solving the light scattering problem and identifying particle…
Developing 'smart' membranes that allow precise and reversible control of molecular permeation using external stimuli would be of intense interest for many areas of science: from physics and chemistry to life-sciences. In particular,…
Optical metasurfaces (OMSs) have shown unprecedented capabilities for versatile wavefront manipulations at the subwavelength scale, thus opening fascinating perspectives for next generation ultracompact optical devices and systems. However,…
An important challenge in the field of materials design and synthesis is to deliberately design mesoscopic objects starting from well-defined precursors and inducing directed movements in them to emulate biological processes. Recently,…
We study optomechanically induced transparency in a microresonator coupled with nanoparticles. By tuning the relative angle of the nanoparticles, exceptional points (EPs) emerge periodically in this system and thus strongly modify both the…
Electro-optical modulators are essential components in optical communication systems. They encode an electrical waveform onto an optical carrier. However, their performance is often limited by inherent electro-optic processes and…
Active metasurfaces promise spatiotemporal control over optical wavefronts, but achieving high-speed modulation with pixel-level control has remained an unmet challenge. While local phase control can be achieved with nanoscale optical…
Photonic devices exhibiting all-optically reconfigurable polarization dependence with a large dynamic range would be highly attractive for active polarization control. Here, we report that strongly polarization-selective nonlinear…
Collective control of mobile microrobotic swarms is indispensable for their potential high-impact applications in targeted drug delivery, medical diagnostics, parallel micromanipulation, and environmental sensing and remediation. Lack of…
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…
Self-propelled microparticles create flow fields that determine how they interact with surfaces, external flows, and each other. These flow fields fall into distinct classes--pushers, pullers, and neutral swimmers--each exhibiting…
A strongly confined light field necessarily exhibits a local polarization that varies on a subwavelength scale. We demonstrate that a single optical mode of such kind can be used to selectively and simultaneously manipulate atomic ensembles…
Here we demonstrate a synthetic micro-engine, based on long-range controlled movement of colloidal particles, which is induced by a local catalytic reaction. The directed motion at long timescales was achieved by placing specially designed…