Dynamical clustering and phase separation in suspensions of self-propelled colloidal particles.

By I. Buttinoni, Julian Bialk'e, F. Kümmel, Hartmut Löwen, C. Bechinger, Thomas Speck. Physical Review Letters, 2013

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We study experimentally and numerically a (quasi-)two-dimensional colloidal suspension of self-propelled spherical particles. The particles are carbon-coated Janus particles, which are propelled due to diffusiophoresis in a near-critical water-lutidine mixture. At low densities, we find that the driving stabilizes small clusters. At higher densities, the suspension undergoes a phase separation into large clusters and a dilute gas phase. The same qualitative behavior is observed in simulations of a minimal model for repulsive self-propelled particles lacking any alignment interactions. The observed behavior is rationalized in terms of a dynamical instability due to the self-trapping of self-propelled particles.

Subfields: Condensed Matter Physics, Materials Chemistry, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/16e2eb1a9620d4a2903287ee40a39368f5eff8ae

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Citations in the corpus

Tuned, driven, and active soft matter (2015, background): “Here, the blocking mechanism was analyzed in more detail [411] and also investigated experimentally [361].”
Active Particles in Complex and Crowded Environments (2016, methodology): “This was first predicted theoretically (Tailleur and Cates, 2008; Fily and Marchetti, 2012; Redner, Baskaran, and Hagan, 2013) and was recently observed experimentally (Buttinoni et al., 2013; Palacci et al., 2013).”
Assembly and phase transitions of colloidal crystals (2016, background): “Moreover, there have been a few studies of phase transitions in active colloids [108, 168, 170].”
Theories of binary fluid mixtures: from phase-separation kinetics to active emulsions (2017, background): “In several experimental systems, however, coarsening appears to saturate while clusters are at a finite size of perhaps 60–100 particles; the reasons for this are not clear, and various explanations have been suggested, for instance involving cross-phoresis mechanisms (Buttinoni et al. 2013).”
Statistical Mechanics where Newton's Third Law is Broken (2014, background): “Another interesting analogy could be found in the purely kinetic clustering transition occurring with one-component microswimmers, which was recently discovered experimentally [46–48] for catalytically driven particles (see also Refs.”
Cluster Phases and Bubbly Phase Separation in Active Fluids: Reversal of the Ostwald Process (2018, methodology): “As stated in the Introduction, cluster phases have been observed in experiments on active colloids [10,18,19], whereas bubbly phase separation has been observed in simulations of active Brownian particles with hard-core repulsions [7].”
Physics of microswimmers—single particle motion and collective behavior: a review (2014, background): “…(Ben-Jacob et al., 2000; Chen et al., 2012; Gachelin et al., 2013a; Peru- 35 ani et al., 2012; Sokolov et al., 2007) and synthetic microswimmers (Buttinoni et al., 2013; Ibele et al., 2009; Palacci et al., 2013; Theurkauff et al., 2012; Wang et al., 2013), but also in macroscopic systems such…”
Minimal model of active colloids highlights the role of mechanical interactions in controlling the emergent behavior of active matter (2015, background): “Péclet numbers in excess of 100, corresponding to persistence lengths of order 100 particle sizes, are easily reached in experiments in active colloids [39] and finite size effects should be observable in microfluidic de-”
Nonequilibrium equation of state in suspensions of active colloids (2014, neutral): “The idea that self-propulsion provides a mechanism for inducing effective attractive forces in purely repulsive systems of active particles has recently emerged [14, 16, 25, 37].”
The statistical physics of active matter: From self-catalytic colloids to living cells (2017, neutral): “The formation of clusters has been reported for different experimental realizations of self-phoretic colloids and swarms of bacteria [6,40], as shown in Fig.”