Clustering of chemically propelled nanomotors in chemically active environments

Abstract

Synthetic nanomotors powered by chemical reactions have been designed to act as vehicles for active cargo transport, drug delivery as well as a variety of other uses. Collections of such motors, acting in consort, can self-assemble to form swarms or clusters, providing opportunities for applications on various length scales. While such collective behavior has been studied when the motors move in a chemically inactive fluid environment, when the medium in which they move is a chemical network that supports complex spatial and temporal patterns, through simulation and theoretical analysis we show that collective behavior changes. Spatial patterns in the environment can guide and control motor collective states, and interactions of the motors with their environment can give rise to distinctive spatiotemporal motor patterns. The results are illustrated by studies of the motor dynamics in systems that support Turing patterns and spiral waves. This work is relevant for potential applications that involve many active nanomotors moving in complex chemical or biological environments.

8 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (7)

• Self-motile colloidal particles: from directed propulsion to random walk
• Motility-Induced Phase Separation
• Designing phoretic micro- and nano-swimmers
• 'Fuelled' motion: phoretic motility and collective behaviour of active colloids
• Dynamical mean-field theory and weakly non-linear analysis for the phase separation of active Brownian particles
• Chemistry in Motion: Tiny Synthetic Motors
• Chemotactic and hydrodynamic effects on collective dynamics of self-diffusiophoretic Janus motors

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Diffusion of gravitactic chiral active Brownian particles in an asymmetric channel
• Mass-based separation of active Brownian particles in an asymmetric channel