Geometrically Designing the Kinematic Behavior of Catalytic Nanomotors

Abstract

Catalytic nanomotors with silica microbead heads and TiO(2) arms are systematically designed by dynamic shadowing growth. The swimming trajectories are fine tuned by altering the arm length and orientation exploiting geometry-dependent hydrodynamic interactions at low Reynolds number. The curvature, angular frequency, and radius of curvature of the trajectories change as a function of arm length. Simulations based on the method of regularized Stokeslets are also described and correctly capture the trends observed in the experiments.