Physical Review Letters· 2012Q1
Dynamic Clustering in Active Colloidal Suspensions with Chemical Signaling
- 750citations
- Q1SCImago
- 2012year
Short summary
Active colloids in dense suspensions form a novel, stationary cluster phase at intermediate densities, characterized by dynamic merging and separation, with average aggregate size growing linearly with self-propelling velocity.
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Key points
- A novel stationary cluster phase exists in dense active colloidal suspensions at intermediate densities.
- This phase is characterized by dynamic merging and separation of colloidal aggregates.
- The average size of these clusters grows linearly with the self-propelling velocity.
- A chemotactic aggregation mechanism, involving diffusiophoretic chemical interactions, explains the observed behavior.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
In this Letter, we explore experimentally the phase behavior of a dense active suspension of self-propelled colloids. In addition to a solidlike and gaslike phase observed for high and low densities, a novel cluster phase is reported at intermediate densities. This takes the form of a stationary assembly of dense aggregates-resulting from a permanent dynamical merging and separation of active colloids-whose average size grows with activity as a linear function of the self-propelling velocity. While different possible scenarios can be considered to account for these observations-such as a generic velocity weakening instability recently put forward-we show that the experimental results are reproduced mathematically by a chemotactic aggregation mechanism, originally introduced to account for bacterial aggregation and accounting here for diffusiophoretic chemical interaction between colloidal swimmers.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Physical Review Letters, 2012 · DOI ↗
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Field: Condensed Matter Physics
Condensed Matter PhysicsPhysics and Astronomy