Bouncing, chasing or pausing: asymmetric collisions of active droplets
arXiv:2002.05085 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevFluids.5.032201
Abstract
Chemically-active droplets exhibit complex avoiding trajectories. While heterogeneity is inevitable in active matter experiments, it is mostly overlooked in their modelling. Exploiting its geometric simplicity, we fully-resolve the head-on collision of two swimming droplets of different radii and demonstrate that even a small contrast in size critically conditions their collision and subsequent dynamics. We identify three fundamentally-different regimes. The resulting high sensitivity of pairwise collisions is expected to profoundly affect their collective dynamics.
7 pages, 5 figures, to appear in Physical Review Fluids
References in corpus (17)
- Active Particles in Complex and Crowded Environments
- Bacterial hydrodynamics
- Circular motion of asymmetric self-propelling particles
- Emergent behavior in active colloids
- Self-propulsion of pure water droplets by spontaneous Marangoni stress driven motion
- Chemotaxis and auto-chemotaxis of self-propelling artificial droplet swimmers
- Spontaneous autophoretic motion of isotropic particles
- Curling Liquid Crystal Microswimmers: a cascade of spontaneous symmetry breaking
- Flow-induced phase separation of active particles is controlled by boundary conditions
- Phoretic Interactions Between Active Droplets
- Swimming active droplet: A theoretical analysis
- Nonlinear dynamics of a chemically-active drop: from steady to chaotic self-propulsion
- Self-propulsion near the onset of Marangoni instability of deformable active droplets
- Spontaneous motion and deformation of a self-propelled droplet
- Topological Stabilization and Dynamics of Self-propelling Nematic Shells
- Collisions and rebounds of chemically-active droplets
- Collision between chemically-driven self-propelled drops