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The development of synthetic microswimmers has advanced our understanding of the fundamental self-propelled mechanisms of living systems. However, there are scarce studies at the microscale within highly structured anisotropic media, such…
Individual self-propelled colloidal particles, like active Brownian particles (ABP) or run-and-tumble swimmers (RT), exhibit characteristic and well-known motion patterns. However, their interaction with obstacles remains an open and…
Developing angular trapping methods, which will enable optical tweezers to rotate a micronized bead, is of great importance for the studies of biomacromolecules during a wide range of torque-generation processes. Here we report a novel…
We investigate experimentally the single-particle motion in water of silica colloidal beads half-coated with carbon under the action of a converging laser beam. The beads are self-propelled in this medium by means of self-thermophoresis…
Controlled trapping of light absorbing nanoparticles with low-power optical tweezers is crucial for remote manipulation of small objects. This study takes advantage of the synergetic effects of tightly confined local fields of plasmonic…
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…
Self-propelling active particles are an exciting and interdisciplinary emerging area of research with projected biomedical and environmental applications. Due to their autonomous motion, control over these active particles that are free to…
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…
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…
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…
Active colloidal systems with non-equilibrium self-organization is a long-standing, challenging area in biology. To understand how hydrodynamic flow may be used to actively control self-assembly of Janus particles (JPs), we use a model…
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…
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…
Optothermal interaction of active colloidal matter can facilitate environmental cues which can influence the dynamics of active soft matter systems. The optically induced thermal effect can be harnessed to study non-equilibrium…
Janus phoretic colloids (JPs) self-propel as a result of self-generated chemical gradients and exhibit spontaneous nontrivial dynamics within phoretic suspensions, on length scales much larger than the microscopic swimmer size. Such…
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…
A gold-capped Janus particle suspended in a near-critical binary liquid mixture can self-propel under illumination. We have immobilized such a particle in a narrow channel and studied the nonequilibrium dynamics of a binary solvent around…
Optical forces - studied since the earliest days of laser physics - continue to reveal rich dynamics and enable powerful tools for manipulation of objects on micro- and nanoscales, and even individual atoms. Lateral optical forces, which…
Self-organisation is driven by the interactions between the individual components of a system mediated by the environment, and is one of the most important strategies used by many biological systems to develop complex and functional…
The dynamics of self-propelled colloidal particles are strongly influenced by their environment through hydrodynamic and, in many cases, chemical interactions. We develop a theoretical framework to describe the motion of confined active…