Abstract
Catalytic swimmers have attracted much attention as alternatives to biological systems for examining collective microscopic dynamics and the response to physico-chemical signals. Yet, understanding and predicting even the most fundamental characteristics of their individual propulsion still raises important challenges. While chemical asymmetry is widely recognized as the cornerstone of catalytic propulsion, different experimental studies have reported that particles with identical chemical properties may propel in opposite directions. Here, we show that, beyond its chemical properties, the detailed shape of a catalytic swimmer plays an essential role in determining its direction of motion, demonstrating the compatibility of the classical theoretical framework with experimental observations.
Highlights
HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not
While chemical asymmetry is widely recognized as the cornerstone of catalytic propulsion, different experimental studies have reported that particles with identical chemical properties may propel in opposite directions
Using the classical framework of autophoresis, we demonstrate that knowing the polarity of the chemical properties alone is not sufficient to determine the swimming direction of a catalytic particle
Summary
HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. Catalytic swimmers have attracted much attention as alternatives to biological systems for examining collective microscopic dynamics and the response to physico-chemical signals. In order to understand and characterize the properties of such “active fluids”, a number of controllable physical alternatives to biological systems have recently been synthesized and tested[6]. These self-propelled artificial systems, which hold the promise of helping to miniaturize future biomedical applications[7] and can be broadly classified into two different categories: actuated and catalytic swimmers. While actuated swimmers rely on external fields, typically electric[8], magnetic[9,10] and acoustic[11,12], in order to drive the actuation, catalytic propulsion exploits the short-range interactions of a rigid particle with the chemical “fuel” content of its immediate environment in order to generate autonomous propulsion
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