Formation, compression and surface melting of colloidal clusters by active particles
Formation, compression and surface melting of colloidal clusters by active particles
Felix Kümmel, Parmida Shabestari, Celia Lozano, Giovanni Volpe & Clemens Bechinger
Soft Matter 11(31), 6187—6191 (2015)
DOI: 10.1039/C5SM00827A
We demonstrate with experiments and numerical simulations that the structure and dynamics of a suspension of passive particles is strongly altered by adding a very small (o1%) number of active particles. With increasing passive particle density, we observe first the formation of dynamic clusters comprised of passive particles being surrounded by active particles, then the merging and compression of these clusters, and eventually the local melting of crystalline regions by enclosed active particles.
Reply to comment on “Circular motion of asymmetric self-propelling particles”
Reply to comment on “Circular motion of asymmetric self-propelling particles”
Felix Kümmel, Borge ten Hagen, Raphael Wittkowski, Daisuke Takagi, Ivo Buttinoni, Ralf Eichhorn, Giovanni Volpe, Hartmut Löwen & Clemens Bechinger
Physical Review Letters 113(2), 029802 (2014)
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.113.029802
arXiv: 1407.4016
Micron-sized self-propelled (active) particles can be considered as model systems for characterizing more complex biological organisms like swimming bacteria or motile cells. We produce asymmetric microswimmers by soft lithography and study their circular motion on a substrate and near channel boundaries. Our experimental observations are in full agreement with a theory of Brownian dynamics for asymmetric self-propelled particles, which couples their translational and orientational motion.
Active Brownian motion tunable by light
Ivo Buttinoni, Giovanni Volpe, Felix Kümmel, Giorgio Volpe & Clemens Bechinger
Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter 24(28), 284129 (2012)
DOI: 10.1088/0953-8984/24/28/284129
arXiv: 1110.2202
Active Brownian particles are capable of taking up energy from their environment and converting it into directed motion; examples range from chemotactic cells and bacteria to artificial micro-swimmers. We have recently demonstrated that Janus particles, i.e. gold-capped colloidal spheres, suspended in a critical binary liquid mixture perform active Brownian motion when illuminated by light. In this paper, we investigate in more detail their swimming mechanism, leading to active Brownian motion. We show that the illumination-borne heating induces a local asymmetric demixing of the binary mixture, generating a spatial chemical concentration gradient which is responsible for the particle’s self-diffusiophoretic motion. We study this effect as a function of the functionalization of the gold cap, the particle size and the illumination intensity: the functionalization determines what component of the binary mixture is preferentially adsorbed at the cap and the swimming direction (towards or away from the cap); the particle size determines the rotational diffusion and, therefore, the random reorientation of the particle; and the intensity tunes the strength of the heating and, therefore, of the motion. Finally, we harness this dependence of the swimming strength on the illumination intensity to investigate the behavior of a micro-swimmer in a spatial light gradient, where its swimming properties are space-dependent.
