Self-motile colloidal particles: from directed propulsion to random walk.

By J. Howse, Richard A. L. Jones, A. Ryan, T. Gough, Reza Vafabakhsh, R. Golestanian. Physical Review Letters, 2007

1,666 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The motion of an artificial microscale swimmer that uses a chemical reaction catalyzed on its own surface to achieve autonomous propulsion is fully characterized experimentally. It is shown that at short times it has a substantial component of directed motion, with a velocity that depends on the concentration of fuel molecules. At longer times, the motion reverts to a random walk with a substantially enhanced diffusion coefficient. Our results suggest strategies for designing artificial chemotactic systems.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Condensed Matter Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/82eecda80dd752e4dc77f945bf156734c3dcf651

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In Biomedical Engineering

In Condensed Matter Physics

Citations in the corpus

The hydrodynamics of swimming microorganisms (2008, methodology): “Locomotion powered by chemical reactions [313].”
Minimal model of active colloids highlights the role of mechanical interactions in controlling the emergent behavior of active matter (2015, background): “These include autophoretic colloids [5, 6, 17], rollers [18], and droplets [19].”
A micrometre-sized heat engine operating between bacterial reservoirs (2016, positive): “In light of the recent advances in the fabrication of micro and nanoparticles that can be rendered active[25] by chemical[26], optical[27], electric and magentic fields[28], active reservoirs can readily provide a self-contained source of noise.”
Nonequilibrium equation of state in suspensions of active colloids (2014, neutral): “Experimentally, active colloidal systems have been mostly characterized so far through detailed single particle studies [6, 7] in the dilute gas limit, where particles only interact with the solvent.”
Active suspensions and their nonlinear models (2013, background): “On the experimental side, the prospect of using synthetic autonomous microswimmers [16,17,19,20,140,141] such as chemically powered nanorods may offer an opportunity to test predictions from kinetic theories and other models more quantitatively, though such swimmers have yet to be deployed in large ”
Active Particles in Complex and Crowded Environments (2016, methodology): “This concept, which was originally pioneered by Howse et al. (2007), has been very successful, and has been used and modified by many other groups worldwide.”