Issue 48, 2016

Dynamic self-organization of side-propelling colloidal rods: experiments and simulations

Abstract

In recent years, there is a growing interest in designing artificial analogues of living systems, fueled not only by potential applications as ‘smart micro-machines’, but also by the demand for simple models that can be used to study the behavior of their more complex natural counterparts. Here, we present a facile, internally driven, experimental system comprised of fluorescently labeled colloidal silica rods of which the self-propulsion is powered by the decomposition of H2O2 catalyzed by a length-wise half Pt coating of the particles in order to study how shape anisotropy and swimming direction affect the collective behavior. We investigated the emerging structures and their time evolution for various particle concentrations in (quasi-)two dimensional systems for three aspect ratios of the rods on a single particle level using a combination of experiments and simulations. We found that the dynamic self-organization relied on a competition between self-propulsion and phoretic attractions induced by phoresis of the rods. We observed that the particle clustering behavior depends on the concentration as well as the aspect ratio of the rods. Our findings provide a more detailed understanding of dynamic self-organization of anisotropic particles and the role the propulsion direction plays in internally driven systems.

Graphical abstract: Dynamic self-organization of side-propelling colloidal rods: experiments and simulations

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
31 Jul 2016
Accepted
14 Nov 2016
First published
21 Nov 2016

Soft Matter, 2016,12, 9657-9665

Dynamic self-organization of side-propelling colloidal rods: experiments and simulations

H. R. Vutukuri, Z. Preisler, T. H. Besseling, A. van Blaaderen, M. Dijkstra and W. T. S. Huck, Soft Matter, 2016, 12, 9657 DOI: 10.1039/C6SM01760F

To request permission to reproduce material from this article, 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 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