Related papers: Gating and tunable confinement of active colloids …
Motivated by the idea of using simple macroscopic examples to illustrate the physics of complex systems, we modify a historic experimental setup in which interacting floating magnets spontaneously self-assemble into ordered clusters. By…
Active particles under soft confinement such as droplets or vesicles present intriguing phenomena, as collective motion emerges alongside the deformation of the environment. A model is employed to systematically investigate droplet…
Proliferation and motility are ubiquitous drivers of activity in biological systems. Here, we study a dense binary mixture of motile and proliferating particles with exclusively repulsive interactions, where homeostasis in the proliferating…
Transistors, regardless of their size, rely on electrical gates to control the conductance between source and drain contacts. In atomic-scale transistors, this conductance is exquisitely sensitive to single electrons hopping via individual…
The organization of nano-particles inside grafted polymer layers is governed by the interplay of polymer-induced entropic interactions and the action of externally applied fields. Earlier work had shown that strong external forces can drive…
Block copolymer melts offer a unique template to control the position and alignment of nanoparticles due to their ability to self-assemble into periodic ordered structures. Active Brownian particles are shown to co-assemble with block…
In this work, we demonstrate that the nonlinear response of certain soft-matter systems can be tailored at will by appropriately engineering their optical polarizability. In particular, we deliberately synthesize stable colloidal…
Recently we studied $N$ run-and-tumble particles in one dimension - which switch with rate $\gamma$ between driving velocities $\pm v_0$ - interacting via the long range 1D Coulomb potential (also called rank interaction), both in the…
Recently, we proposed a self-propelled particle model with competing alignment interactions: nearby particles tend to align their velocities whereas they anti-align their direction of motion with particles which are further away [R.…
The miniaturization of machines towards the micron and nanoscales requires the development of joint-like elements that enable and constrain motion. We present a facile method to create colloidal joints, that is, anisotropic colloidal…
We discuss the problem of two particles interacting via short-range interactions within a harmonic-oscillator trap. The interactions are organized according to their number of derivatives and defined in truncated model spaces made from a…
Previous experiments have shown that spherical colloidal particles relax to equilibrium slowly after they adsorb to a liquid-liquid interface, despite the large interfacial energy gradient driving the adsorption. The slow relaxation has…
Social organisms which construct nests consisting of tunnels and chambers necessarily navigate confined and crowded conditions. Unlike low-density collectives like bird flocks and insect swarms, in which hydrodynamic and statistical…
Flocking, as paradigmatically exemplified by birds, is the coherent collective motion of active agents. As originally conceived, flocking emerges through alignment interactions between the agents. Here, we report that flocking can also…
We consider a microscopic field theoretical approach for interacting active nematic particles. With only steric interactions the self-propulsion strength in such systems can lead to different collective behaviour, e.g., synchronized…
We study elastic interactions between colloidal particles and deformation landscapes of undulations in a cholesteric liquid crystal under an electric field applied normal to cholesteric layers. The onset of undulation instability is…
Collective guidance of out-of-equilibrium systems without using external fields is a challenge of paramount importance in active matter, ranging from bacterial colonies to swarms of self-propelled particles. Designing strategies to guide…
Electrokinetically-driven Janus colloids, e.g., with one metallic and one dielectric hemisphere, confined between parallel walls exhibit a boundary-accumulation mechanism enabled by an effective cross-channel diffusivity which is distinct…
Dynamical clustering represents a characteristic feature of active matter consisting of self-propelled agents that convert energy from the environment into mechanical motion. At the micron scale, typical of overdamped dynamics, particles…
We present an experimental realization of the collective trapping phase transition [Kaiser et al., PRL 108, 268307 (2012)], using motile polar granular rods in the presence of a V-shaped obstacle. We offer a theory of this transition based…