Related papers: Soft Colloidal Robots: Magnetically Guided Liquid …
Spin superfluids enable long-distance spin transport through classical ferromagnets by developing topologically stable magnetic textures. For small spins at low dimensions, however, the topological protection suffers from strong quantum…
Increasing amounts of information force the continuous improvement of information storage and processing technologies, further device miniaturization, and their efficiency increase. Magnetic skyrmions, topological quasiparticles, and the…
The ability to dictate colloid motion is an important challenge in fields ranging from materials science to living systems. Here, by embedding energy landscapes in confined nematic liquid crystals, we design a versatile platform to define…
Fluid ferroelectrics, a recently discovered class of liquid crystals that exhibit switchable, long-range polar order, offer opportunities in ultrafast electro-optic technologies, responsive soft matter, and next-generation energy materials.…
Magnetic droplets are nanoscale, non-topological, dynamical solitons that can be nucleated in different spintronic devices, such as spin torque nano-oscillators (STNOs) and spin Hall nano-oscillators (SHNOs). This chapter first briefly…
Solitonic magnetic excitations such as domain walls and, specifically, skyrmionics enable the possibility of compact, high density, ultrafast,all-electronic, low-energy devices, which is the basis for the emerging area of skyrmionics. The…
The transport on top of a periodic two-dimensional hexagonal magnetic pattern of (i) a single macroscopic steel sphere, (ii) a doublet of wax/magnetite composite spheres, and (iii) an immiscible mixture of ferrofluid droplets with a…
Knotted fields in classical and quantum systems have long been recognized for their non-trivial topologies and particle-like behavior, but practical applications have been limited by the difficulty of stabilizing them. Recently, stable…
We demonstrate a general method to assemble and propel highly maneuverable colloidal carpets which can be steered via remote control in any direction of the plane. These colloidal micropropellers are composed by an ensemble of spinning…
Magnetic skyrmions are small swirling topological defects in the magnetization texture stabilized by the protection due to their topology. In most cases they are induced by chiral interactions between atomic spins existing in…
Soft growing robots, are a type of robots that are designed to move and adapt to their environment in a similar way to how plants grow and move with potential applications where they could be used to navigate through tight spaces, dangerous…
Dynamic control of a soft-body robot to deliver complex behaviors with low-dimensional actuation inputs is challenging. In this paper, we present a computational approach to automatically generate versatile, underactuated control policies…
Robotic materials are multi-robot systems formulated to leverage the low-order computation and actuation of the constituents to manipulate the high-order behavior of the entire material. We study the behaviors of ensembles composed of smart…
Topological semimetals have emerged as an important class of quantum materials with novel electronic responses and unconventional transport phenomena. Among them, nodal-line semimetals are distinguished by band crossings that extend along…
Magnetic skyrmions, which are topological particle-like excitations in ferromagnets, have attracted a lot of attention recently. Skyrmionics is an attempt to use magnetic skyrmions as information carriers in next generation spintronic…
The transport behavior of a system of gravitationally driven colloidal particles is investigated. The particle interactions are determined by the superparamagnetic behavior of the particles. They can thus be arranged in a crystalline order…
Recent advances reveal that light propagation in free space supports many exotic topological textures, such as skyrmions. Their unique space-time topologies make them promising candidates as next-generation robust information carriers.…
Continuum soft robots are mechanical systems entirely made of continuously deformable elements. This design solution aims to bring robots closer to invertebrate animals and soft appendices of vertebrate animals (e.g., an elephant's trunk, a…
From protein motifs to black holes, topological solitons are pervasive nonlinear excitations that are robust and can be driven by external fields. So far, existing driving mechanisms all accelerate solitons and antisolitons in opposite…
Microfluidic devices manufactured from soft polymeric materials have emerged as a paradigm for cheap, disposable and easy-to-prototype fluidic platforms for integrating chemical and biological assays and analyses. The interplay between the…