Issue 47, 2020

Apparent phototaxis enabled by Brownian motion

Abstract

Biomimetic behaviour in artificially created active matter that allows deterministic and controlled motility has become of growing interest in recent years. It is well known that phototrophic bacteria optimize their position with respect to light by phototaxis. Here, we describe how our fully artificial, magnetic and photocatalytic microswimmers undergo a specific type of behaviour that strongly resembles phototaxis: when crossing an illuminated stripe the particles repeatedly turn back towards the light once they reach the dark region, without any obvious reason for the particles to do so. In order to understand the origin of this behaviour we analyze different influences and elucidate through experiments and theoretical considerations that this behavior arises from a combination of orientational stabilization through activity and destabilizing Brownian motion. This interplay shows beautifully how simple physical effects can combine into complex behaviours.

Graphical abstract: Apparent phototaxis enabled by Brownian motion

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
04 sen 2020
Accepted
20 okt 2020
First published
20 okt 2020
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY-NC license

Soft Matter, 2020,16, 10585-10590

Apparent phototaxis enabled by Brownian motion

L. Niese, L. Wang, S. Das and J. Simmchen, Soft Matter, 2020, 16, 10585 DOI: 10.1039/D0SM01603A

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications, without requesting further permission from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given and it is not used for commercial purposes.

To request permission to reproduce material from this article in a commercial publication, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party commercial publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements