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Updated: Dec 22, 2025

Patterning of Microorganisms and Microparticles through Sequential Capillarity-assisted Assembly
Published on: November 4, 2021
Different-shaped micro-objects driven by active particle aggregations
1CAS Key Laboratory of Mechanical Behavior and Design of Materials, Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Science at the Microscale, CAS Center for Excellence in Complex System Mechanics, Department of Modern Mechanics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230026, China. jianghy@ustc.edu.cn.
Abstract:
The dynamics of passive micro-objects in an active bath has been receiving much attention. However, the influence of the shapes of micro-objects remains unclear. Here, we use 2D simulation to investigate the interaction between active Brownian particles and different-shaped passive micro-objects. We show that active particles accumulate around micro-objects and self-assemble into living aggregations at a high active velocity and high volume fraction. The shapes of micro-objects affect the distributions of the aggregations. In turn, the different distribution of aggregations influences the motion of micro-objects and induces abnormal diffusive behaviors. We further demonstrate that polar distributed aggregations at a high active velocity and the inhibition of the active bath at a low active velocity induce the counterintuitive anisotropic enhanced diffusion of rods, and the steric interaction between active particles induces the reverse translation-rotation coupled diffusion of chevrons.

